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SERMONS. 



SERMONS 



BY 



FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE 

o 

AUTHOR OF 

REASON IN RELIGION, WAYS OF THE SPIRIT, ATHEISM IN 

PHILOSOPHY, THE PRIMEVAL WORLD OF 

HEBREW TRADITION 



BOSTON 

AMERICAN UNITARIAN ASSOCIATION 

1902 



S*3 



If" 2 " 



.*** 



Copyright, 1891, 
By Roberts Brothers. 






U» 



^Entbersitp Press: 
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U. S. A. 



CONTENTS. 



Page 

I. Three Views of Life 1 

II. Authorities and Scribes 21 

III. The Lesson of Flowers 35 

IV. Nothing to Draw with 50 

V. The Pure in Heart shall see God .... 68 

VI. The Soul's Deliverance 81 

VII. Reserved Power 97 

VIII. The Gospel of Manual Labor 109 

IX. The Lot of the Called 120 

X. The Baptist and the Christ 139 

XL The Broad Church 150 

XII. Love cancels Obligation 171 

XIII. And wished for Day 183 

XIV. All Things to all Men 199 

XV. Strength in Weakness 211 

XVI. Spirits in Prison 224 



vi CONTENTS. 

Page 

XVII. The Spirit's Rest 235 

XVIII. The Religion of the Resurrection . . . 249 

XIX. Love is of God 261 

XX. Our Life is in God ......... 276 

XXI. The Comforter 288 

XXII. All Souls' Day 301 

XXIII. Conscience 315 

XXIV. The Future Life 329 



THEEE VIEWS OF LIFE. 

Give me the portion of goods that falleth to me. 

Luke xv. 12. 

Nay ; but I will verily buy it for the full price. 

1 Chron. xxi. 24. 

It is more blessed to give than to receive. 

Acts xx. 35. 

/"AUIi manner of life will depend very much on 
^^ the view we take of the meaning and ends 
of life. Our practice will correspond with our the- 
ory. Perhaps you have no definite theory on the 
subject. You may not be conscious of entertain- 
ing one. I suppose very few are conscious of any 
such thing. You do not speculate; you do not rea- 
son ; you project no elaborate scheme ; you seldom 
say distinctly to yourself, This is my view and plan 
of life, and such is the use I intend to make of 
myself and the world. Nevertheless, we all have 
our theory, conscious or unconscious. We have 
our general idea of life, which consciously or un- 
consciously underlies our scheming and our dream- 

1 



2 THREE VIEWS OF LIFE. 

ing, according to which our course is shaped, and 
according to which our destiny proceeds. 

Now, there are three principal views of life indi- 
cated in the three brief passages of Scripture which 
I have quoted. I will call them the childish view, 
the manly view, and the heroic view. 

1. The first is the childish view. Its language 
is, " Give me the portion of goods that falleth to 
me." Observe the expression, " falleth to me," — as 
if anything fell to us of right. The distinguishing 
principle in this view of life is having without get- 
ting, unconditional reception, gratuitous bounty, 
unmerited luck : " Give me the portion of goods 
that falleth to me." You remember who it was 
that the Scripture represents as making this de- 
mand. It was the Prodigal Son in the parable. 
His subsequent career is a signal illustration of 
the natural tendency and practical operation of 
this view of life. This young man, it seems, — 
very young he must have been, and very green in 
his judgments and expectations, — looked out upon 
the world from beneath the paternal roof, and saw 
there something that drew him with irresistible 
attraction. 

What was it? A life of active usefulness? Hon- 
orable distinction, the respect and good-will of his 
fellow-citizens, the consciousness of well-doing, 
well-merited success ? Nothing of the sort ! He 



THREE VIEWS OF LIFE. 3 

was not looking in that direction. He saw a vision 
of a fast young man, centre of a choice circle of 
boon companions of both sexes, occupying them- 
selves with games of chance, tossing the incon- 
stant dice, or reclining at the mighty banquet, the 
sparkling wine-cup in their hands, the festive chap- 
let on their brows, enjoying " the good things that 
are present," and " speedily using the creatures 
as in youth." This was his vision of a blessed 
life. And he said to his father, " Give me the 
portion of goods that falleth to me." And the 
father, who should have known better, gave it to 
him. Foolish man ! He has a son who is bound 
for destruction, and he gives him a swift horse 
to carry him thither ! Forbear, rash father ! Re- 
sist thy son's importunate desire ! If he ask for 
money, give him work. If he come to thee for a 
living, send him to Joppa, place him in charge of 
some prudent shipmaster, to do business on the 
great waters, to struggle with the elements ; or 
bind him apprentice to some useful handicraft. 
But by all means withhold from him yet that por- 
tion of goods, nor send a young man into the 
world with large means and little sense and no 
principle, and no guidance but his own mad will. 

It is not my design to follow out this particular 
case of practical aberration resulting from a false 
and foolish theory of life. It is one of the proofs 



4 THREE VIEWS OF LIFE. 

of the blessed Master's insight into human char- 
acter that thus deduces the profligate life of the 
prodigal son from the false expectation with which 
he begins his career. 

" Give me the portion of goods that falleth to 
me." How many young men set out in life with 
this demand, thinking more of their fancied claims 
than they do of their real obligations, more of luck 
than of work, of that which is to fall to them than 
of what they are to win by their own labor; re- 
garding life as a game of chance instead of a long 
and laborious task, — the world as a house of en- 
tertainment, board and lodging free, or nearly so, 
and sumptuous at that, — everything that heart can 
wish, with very little trouble in the getting of it ! 
This childish view of life has many modifications. 
One expects his portion of goods to fall to him by 
inheritance ; another expects it by special indul- 
gence from the world. Here is one who has no 
thought of maintaining himself by any adequate 
exertion of his own; and there one whose notion 
of self -maintenance consists in so watching his 
opportunity as to snatch a competence by some 
lucky hit, some financial operation which creates 
no real values, but realizes large profits on the 
faith of artificial ones. 

In either case, and in all cases where this view 
is held, whether consciously or unconsciously, the 



THREE VIEWS OF LIFE. 5 

main point is having without producing, or having 
beyond all proportion more than one produces by 
legitimate effort. The view implies an imaginary 
claim, — the portion that falleth to me: as if any- 
thing fell to us of right ; as if the mere fact of our 
existence and our wants created a claim to any- 
thing more than the requisite faculty by which 
that existence is maintained and those wants sup- 
plied. This is all that Nature furnishes to any of 
her children. No creature is supported without 
an adequate outlay of strength or skill, or without 
some equivalent in return for its maintenance. 
Why should man, of all creatures the most richly 
endowed, with faculties equal to all the exigencies 
of his complex life, — why should he be indulged 
with an ease accorded to no creature besides ? 

You say your existence is not voluntary, — you 
did not ask to be ; you were thrust into the world 
without any will of your own: the world which 
produced you is bound to maintain you ; the world 
owes you a living. It may be so ; but whether or 
not the obligation exists on the part of the world 
is a matter of no practical consequence. It is cer- 
tain that the world will not maintain you except 
on certain conditions. You must either work or 
steal, by whatever name you call your stealing. 
Every other existence is just as uncalled for as 
your own. Beast, bird, and insect did not ask to 



6 THREE VIEWS OF LIFE. 

be; they are thrust upon the world without any 
wish or will of their own. But if one of these 
creatures should deny its instincts, and call upon 
Nature to maintain it, and take no thought for 
itself, there is no provision made for it : none of 
its tribe will minister to it ; it must inevitably per- 
ish. Your existence is forced upon you ; but along 
with that existence are given you the faculties and 
organs needful for your support, — the reasoning 
mind, the cunning hand, brain, sinews, muscles, — 
and, for capital, a vast amount of hereditary knowl- 
edge, the accumulated wisdom of all preceding 
generations. With this outfit your claim is satis- 
fied ; you have no fair title to anything more than 
this, except as you create one by your service. 
Beyond this the world owes you nothing but wages 
for your work. 

Let us see what kind of character is likely to go 
with the childish view of life, what kind of charac- 
ter it is likely to produce, what kind of life he is 
likely to lead who is looking for something to 
fall to him without compensation. Self-indulgence, 
luxurious indolence, will form the distinguishing 
trait in such a character and such a life, — that 
indolence, which, if not the most deadly, is the 
most incurable of moral diseases, lodging itself in 
the marrow of the bones, and becoming a compo- 
nent part of the system it attacks. And indolence 



THREE VIEWS OF LIFE. 7 

loves company. Profligate and dissolute life is its 
natural concomitant. He who takes his portion of 
goods without an equivalent will not be very scru- 
pulous as to the amount which he takes. The 
principle is the same, whether he takes much or 
little. When once a man opens an account with 
his neighbor for goods which he has no means and 
no serious intention of paying for, he is not careful 
to limit the amount by the actual necessities of his 
condition. He will go on taking as long as goods 
and credit last. 

Neither will such a character be likely to use 
with moderation the portion of goods which he 
takes. That which is easily got is easily dissi- 
pated ; and he who begins by living without cost to 
himself will be likely to end with the heaviest cost 
which a man can pay for his living, — the price of 
his innocence. 

Or suppose this view of life to be entertained 
with somewhat different modifications. Suppose 
it to be entertained by a person of some energy, 
who is not content to be inactive, and does not 
look to be maintained without effort, but whose 
idea and expectation are to acquire a sudden and 
ample fortune, with the least possible outlay of 
actual labor. In that case the life will not be an 
indolent and dissolute one, but a life of cunning 
and intrigue, a life spent in speculating on the 



8 THREE VIEWS OF LIFE. 

industry and credulity of others, instead of toiling 
and amassing for one's self. Most of our politi- 
cians by profession are of this class. The world 
abounds in characters and lives of this descrip- 
tion. There is a prevalent shrinking from hard 
work, — a disposition to throw off the burden of 
productive industry on those who are forced by 
necessity to undertake it ; to strike out easier and 
quicker roads to wealth, while others plod the 
rugged way to delving toil; to play at dice with 
the world ; to gamble for one's portion of goods 
instead of working for it, without considering very 
nicely the rules of fair play, if any such rules 
there be in such a game. The clerk in the shop 
or counting-room who embezzles the proceeds of 
his master's business to defray the cost of his 
pleasant vices, the agent of a joint-stock company 
who appropriates the general funds, are the natu- 
ral products of this tendency. It manifests itself 
in other ways. The excess of trade over humbler 
and more laborious pursuits, the abuse of credit, 
financiering on the large and the small scale, spec- 
ulations and peculations, and whatever else par- 
takes of this character, are all symptoms of the 
manifold and wide-spread disease engendered by 
this false view of life. 

But, aside from these, the state of mind which 
this view originates in or presupposes is radically 



THREE VIEWS OF LIFE. 9 

wrong, and at war with the evident design of 
Deity implied in the human organism. Every 
muscle in the human body is a protest against it. 
Every faculty in the human mind refutes and con- 
demns it. By every muscle in his body and by 
every faculty in his mind, man is called and bound 
and dedicated by God to labor. 

Some allowance must be made for the difficulty, 
in many cases, of finding the needful employment 
and a sphere of action congenial with or suited to 
one's powers. There come to us beggars who beg 
for work. A very legitimate kind of begging is 
that. Sad that we should ever be unable to satisfy 
that demand, — that we cannot always bring those 
muscles and sinews, that good-will and faculty, 
into fruitful contact with the world of matter and 
the necessary tasks of society. Sad the spectacle 
of young men or young women who are willing to 
work and can find no work to do. Sad the will 
without the opportunity, but sadder still the oppor- 
tunity without the will. There is no more mel- 
ancholy spectacle than to see a young man in the 
bloom of life, with sound health and a perfect 
organization, shrinking from labor and suffering 
his days to glide away without profit to himself 
or the world. 

Suppose some costly ship, designed to navigate 
the seas, never to become acquainted with her 



10 THREE VIEWS OF LIFE. 

proper element, never to dip her keel into the 
wave, never to feel the surge against her bows 
and the spray in her rigging, but to remain for- 
ever high and dry in the ship-yard, shored and 
propped and carefully stayed to keep her in place, 
and converted, perhaps, into a storehouse or a 
house of entertainment, stuffed with good things 
for home consumption, instead of following her 
natural vocation on the wide deep; or suppose 
that, being launched, instead of traversing the seas 
from continent to continent, and taking and dis- 
charging cargoes at Calcutta or Sydney or Boston, 
she should float a mere pleasure-barge on the 
river's tide. That gallant vessel would not more 
lamentably fail of her destination than the healthy, 
vigorous, and well-endowed youth who has no part 
in the world's work, no path on the world's deep, 
no calling, no mission to his fellow-men, no aim 
or aspiration but to take the portion of goods that 
falleth to him, no business but to enjoy them to 
the uttermost capacity of his stomach. 

2. We come, then, to the second view, — what 
I call the manly view of life. " Nay ; but I will 
verily buy it for the full price." These are the 
words of David to Oman concerning a piece of 
land which David was to purchase in order to 
erect upon it an altar to Jehovah. The land was 
Oman's threshingfloor. " Grant me," said David, 



THREE VIEWS OF LIFE. H 

" the place of this threshingfloor, that I may build 
an altar therein unto the Lord." Now, when Oman 
learned the purpose for which David designed the 
land, he offered it to him without price. He would 
be happy to make him a present of the lot. " Take 
it to thee, and let my lord the king do that which 
is good in his eyes : lo, I give thee the oxen also 
for burnt offerings, and the threshing instruments 
for wood, and the wheat for the meat offering ; I 
give it all." But David was a man of large nature 
and lofty spirit ; he did not choose to get property 
for the Lord in that way. 

Perhaps he was over-scrupulous. If a Christian 
society at the present day, about to build a church, 
should have an offer of a piece of land to be given 
them for that purpose, I fancy they would not hes- 
itate long to accept the gift. But David felt dif- 
ferently. He was a proud man, and he declined 
the gift. "And king David said to Oman, Nay; 
but I will verily buy it for the full price : for I will 
not take that which is thine for the Lord, nor offer 
burnt offerings without cost." And he gave him 
what he held to be a sufficient price. 

You observe here a principle of action involving 
an entirely different view of life from that which 
we have been considering, and which I called the 
childish view. It is that view which regards life 
as an obligation, not as a claim ; as a dispensation 



12 THREE VIEWS OF LIFE. 

of tasks and duties, and not of gratuitous favors ; 
which regards the world as a seed-field where each 
must dig and plant for himself, and where personal 
effort is the just and necessary equivalent for every 
advantage, and not as a storehouse of goods where 
all have free access and may help themselves to 
such things as they like, — or rather as a safe, of 
which some favored few have the key, and may 
take the portion of goods that falleth to them by 
special grace. 

Of this view observe, first, its essential agreement 
with the nature of man, its fitness in relation to 
the human constitution. Every nerve in our body 
is an argument for it. Man is made and consti- 
tuted a working being. It is only by labor that he 
can realize what is in him, — the measure of his 
powers, the measure of his joys, full development, 
full stature, full satisfaction. He must work not 
only to be truly happy and at peace with himself 
and the world, but he must work to be truly human. 
And if any one thinks to thrive without work, he 
will find erelong that Nature has not been consulted 
in that arrangement. One faculty after another 
goes to sleep, one satisfaction after another dies 
out, one hold upon the world after another gives 
way, and at last there remains only the human 
' automaton, with all its life reduced to one or two 
senses, and all its consciousness concentrated in 






THREE VIEWS OF LIFE. 13 

a half-waking dream of self. We read of a Ro- 
man who vegetated after this fashion, and was 
treated as one dead by his acquaintance. They 
wrote upon his house, as on a tomb : " Here lies 
Servilius." 

Observe, next, the agreement between this view 
of life and the constitution of the universe consid- 
ered as a system of legislation, where everything 
has its price, where inexorable law has established 
a fixed ratio between income and outlay, and pro- 
portioned the worth of every product to the price 
it costs, — that is, to the labor and care involved in 
its production. We need not search far to find 
evidence of such a law, or to trace its operation in 
nature and life. A glance at the universe shows 
how all things are conditioned, and how no real 
good can spring from the bosom of Nature or 
the mind of man without its equivalent outlay of 
faculty and labor. There is no luck in Nature, but 
a rigorous legislation extending to the minutest 
particulars and last details of life. Take any 
product of the vegetable world. Examine an ear of 
corn, and study its law. There was only one pos- 
sible way in which that ear could grow, having pre- 
cisely that character and no other. That way 
includes unnumbered details, some of which you 
can trace, and many of which you cannot trace. 
Form, color, size, everything pertaining to it, de- 



14 THREE VIEWS OF LIFE. 

pends on antecedent conditions ; and if one of 
those antecedents had failed, that particular ear 
of corn could never have been. So exact are the 
laws of the natural world. 

Do you suppose that the laws of the moral 
world are less so ? There, too, there is no hap. 
It is all legislation, law. On every good that life 
offers a price is set. For every advantage that 
man wins there is a just equivalent ; and for every 
indulgence that a man steals there is also a just 
equivalent exacted by immutable necessity. You 
may think to have your portion of wordly goods 
without paying for it ; but pay for it you must, 
somewhere and somehow. There is no evading the 
universal law, subtle as light and hard as adamant. 
You may pay the price before or after, as you see 
fit, — < before with adequate effort, after with inevi- 
table reckoning, — but pay it you must. You are 
caught in the coil of this dilemma, and shall in no 
wise come out thence till you have paid the utter- 
most farthing. In the way of action or of suffer- 
ing you must render an equivalent for all that you 
have received of talent, opportunity, gifts, and 
goods. The true wisdom is to face the fact with a 
resolute acceptance of your position and responsi- 
bilities, to front the world with a full understand- 
ing that you can have nothing without paying for it, 
and a fixed determination to take nothing without 



THREE VIEWS OF LIFE. 15 

paying for it, to pay as you go, and to pay the full 
price. 

Consider, lastly, the intrinsic justice of this view 
in relation to society. The well-being of society 
requires that each individual should contribute his 
quota to the common stock. If one may ask for 
the portion of goods that falleth to him without so 
contributing, then all may ; and if all were to wait 
for what falls to them, there would be no portion 
for any. We owe it not only to the present well- 
being of mankind to render as we receive ; we owe 
it to the past. We are debtors to the race, and 
that to an extent which we can but imperfectly re- 
pay at the best. Compare your position in the 
present condition of society with that of primitive 
man. Think of the countless blessings of civilized 
life, from the roof which shelters to the book which 
enlightens or entertains you, to the religion which 
elevates and saves you, — blessings which are life 
itself to the civilized man, which could not be abol- 
ished without loosening the bands of society and 
sending each individual, a solitary savage, into the 
wilderness, — think of these, and consider whence 
they are derived. What we call civilization is the 
product of slow millenniums of faithful toil, the 
gradual contributions of millions in times past of 
such as did not ask for the portion of goods that 
might fall to them, but said, " Nay ; but I will 



16 THREE VIEWS OF LIFE. 

verily buy it for the full price," and often paid 
more than the price for the portion which fell to 
them of worldly good. 

Do you feel no call to emulate their example, 
and out of your ability to pay back at least some 
small fraction of the infinite debt to society ? You 
may not be able to impart any gift or create any 
value which shall cause your name to be inscribed 
among the benefactors of the race. Well, then, 
impart what you have, give what you can of your 
want, as these of their abundance. Your faculty 
such as it is, your time, your good-will, the work 
of your head or your hands, your earthly life, your 
uttermost, whatever it is, — out with it, and in with 
it into the common stock ! Let it go for what it is 
worth, and be sure it will count in the great re- 
sult, — the ground edifice of society, where so many 
myriad lives and works are fitly framed together 
and compacted by that which every joint supplieth. 
Every effort tells. It was well said that he who 
causes two ears of corn to grow where only one 
grew before is a benefactor to society. The unit 
of your labor, be it never so insignificant, is an 
integral constituent in the sum of things. 

3. I can only glance, in conclusion, at the third 
and highest view of life, which I term the heroic, — 
the view implied in the saying, " It is more blessed 
to give than to receive ; " the view of those who not 



THREE VIEWS OF LIFE. \J 

only disdain to receive their portion of goods 
without an equivalent, who not only expect and 
desire to pay for what they get, but who do not 
even expect to get the equivalent, in any market 
sense, for what they give ; who do not think of 
remuneration in kind, who are willing to labor and 
to give, hoping for nothing again. These are the 
heroes of society, without whom, alas ! how poor 
and barren our earthly life ! What a world it 
would be on which we are cast, if nothing had ever 
been done in it without pay ! How large a portion 
of the dearest blessings of life would be wanting to 
us at this moment but for those who were willing 
to spend and be spent without hope of reward, — 
those hero priests who have sacrificed, each in their 
day, at the altar of human weal, and whose sacrifice 
was their life ! The grandest things that have 
been done in this world have been done without 
pay, for this reason, if no other, that the world 
was never rich enough to pay the doers of them. 
There was never money enough coined to satisfy 
their just demands. When Moses placed himself 
at the head of his people, and led them forth, and 
humanity with them, from the bondage of Egypt, 
through all the perils and privations of the desert, 
to the land of promise, he had not been hired for 
that work by the job nor by the day. When the 
Christian confessors of the first three centuries 

2 



18 THREE VIEWS OF LIFE. 

built up painfully, out of their labors and their sor- 
rows, their lives and their deaths, the stupendous 
fabric of the Christian Church, they did not sit 
down first and consider, Would it pay, was it labor 
well invested ? When Gregory the Great adminis- 
tered, in the stormy time on which he was cast, 
amid the agonies of a dying world, the perplexed 
affairs of the Roman see, he did not do it by con- 
tract. When Clarkson toiled and planned and 
struggled and contrived ; when, baffled and disap- 
pointed, he still returned to the charge, and 
struggled on, through twenty long years, for the 
abolition of the slave-trade, — he did not do it on 
speculation. When Eliot, with incredible pains, 
translated the Bible into Indian for the use of the 
natives of Massachusetts, he did not work for so 
much a page, and had no thought of literary fame. 
What shall I more say ? The time would fail me 
to tell of countless others who, by reason of the 
faith that was in them, and the dutiful zeal, and the 
mighty love, " subdued kingdoms, wrought right- 
eousness, obtained promises, out of weakness were 
made strong, waxed valiant in fight, turned to 
flight the armies of the aliens." Thank God for all 
such ! Blessed are ye, heroes, victors, glory-crowned 
in the good fight of faith ! Blessed in all the 
heavens of your renown, blessed in the fruit of your 
works, blessed in the memory of all generations ! 



THREE VIEWS OF LIFE. 19 

And, oh, ye shining ones, " our betters, yet our 
peers, how desert without you our few and evil 
years ! " 

The heroic view of life is not urged as a duty, 
but only commended as a lesson and illustration of 
what is in man, and what may come of him when 
the spirit obtains complete ascendancy over the 
flesh. Tims much, at least, we may learn from 
it, — to think more of giving than of receiving, 
more of the work than the wages in our scheme of 
life. Happy they who know their calling and pur- 
sue it, whose hands have found their proper work 
and do it with their might, rejoicing as a strong 
man to run a race ! It is manly and good to tax 
one's self to the uttermost for personal advantage. 
It is better and heroic to tax one's self to the utter- 
most, without regard to personal advantage, from 
pure devotion to the calling to which we are called, 
the work or craft that employs our powers, and a 
generous zeal for the common good, asking not 
what portion of goods may fall to us of grace, nor 
even how much we can buy by paying the full price, 
but how much by loving industry and unwearied 
pains it may be in our power to contribute to the 
world's riches and the world's growth. And as 
such a life is noblest in itself, so it is in the end 
most profitable to those that engage in it. No labor 
so productive as that which Ave give to an object 



20 THREE VIEWS OF LIFE. 

for its own sake. The more we forget ourselves in 
our doings, the greater the returns they will yield. 
The more we are willing to lose our life in our pur- 
suit, the more surely we shall find in it the fruit of 
our works. 



II. 

AUTHOKITIES AND SCEIBES. 

He taught them as one having authority, and not as 
the scribes. Matt. vii. 29. 

HHHERE are still, and always, these two kinds 
of teaching, — the teaching of authority and 
the teaching of scribes. We all have felt the dif- 
ference without perhaps defining it to ourselves. 
Some men speak to us with authority by word of 
mouth or by books; others, with equal or even 
greater attainments, and so far as we can judge, 
with equal purity of purpose, want that authority 
as speakers or as writers. Whence this difference ? 

What constitutes authority in a teacher ? The 
answer is, Competent testimony, original observa- 
tion by a qualified witness. 

In secular science the majority are dependent on 
the testimony of experts, not having the means of 
verifying the facts for themselves. The ship-mas- 
ter at sea ascertains his longitude by the aid of cer- 
tain tables in his nautical almanac. These tables 



22 AUTHORITIES AND SCRIBES. 

are based on astronomical calculations, and embody 
the results of those calculations for years to come. 
It is not necessary that the ship-master be an astro- 
nomer ; it needs only that he have the testimony of 
competent witnesses in that science. He receives 
their testimony as authority, and relying on that 
authority traverses the pathless ocean without other 
way-mark, and can tell at any moment how far the 
forces that impel his vessel have borne him east or 
west. Relying on that authority, I believe the sun 
to be ninety-five millions of miles from the earth, 
and I expect an eclipse of that body at the mo- 
ment indicated in my almanac. 

But what constitutes authority in religion ? Who 
is the qualified witness of moral and spiritual truth ? 
Here is a kind of knowledge accessible to all. " The 
word is nigh thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart." 
Yet here too, as well as in questions of science, we 
feel and acknowledge the weight of authority. We 
listen to one teacher, and, though what he says is 
undeniably true, and his manner of saying it unex- 
ceptionable, he makes no impression ; we do not 
dispute his statement, but we are not persuaded by 
it. It provokes no dissent, and it carries no con- 
viction. He teaches as the scribes. We listen to 
another who says substantially the same thing, 
and immediately a new world is open to our per- 
ception, a new day shed abroad in our minds. It 



AUTHORITIES AND SCRIBES. 23 

is nothing new that he propounds, but it comes to 
us with the force of a new revelation. Before it 
was a truism, now it is a truth. 

What Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount 
— that which made his hearers astonished at his 
doctrine — was not new ; the scribes had said sub- 
stantially the same ; but the spirit with which it 
was said was new, and that new spirit made the 
Christian evangel a new creation, so that history 
dates from that teacher's word. 

In the multitude, which no man can number, of 
teachers who have spoken from age to age on the 
same eternal themes, — the being of God and the 
destination of man, — there has been but here and 
there one whose word was a power in the world, 
here and there an authority in a world of scribes. 
The recorded words of Jesus and of Paul take very 
little room, and may be read in a couple of hours ; 
but the writings to which they have given rise in 
the way of comment and controversy and discourse, 
if preserved from the beginning and collected to- 
gether, no man could read in a lifetime. The 
greater part of these have perished, and the rest 
will follow. Not a hundred volumes, not fifty, of 
those so-called Bodies of Divinity which cumber 
the shelves of old libraries, will maintain a per- 
manent place in the literature of religion ; while 
the little volume which has furnished the topic of 



24 AUTHORITIES AND SCRIBES. 

so much discoursing is likely to endure, and be 
read and received as authority until some new 
convulsion of the globe shall sweep every vestige 
of existing civilization from the face of the earth. 
This is Humanity's verdict on the relative value of 
these two classes of teachers, — the authorities and 
the scribes. 

Authority is adequate testimony, the word of a 
competent witness. We call it revelation. And 
what is revelation ? Let us free our minds from 
a certain confusion which seems to mystify this 
term. Revelation is not a voice from without, but a 
voice within ; not a prodigious communication out 
of the skies, a doctrine appended to the tail of some 
portent, but the intuition of a rapt soul that has 
met the Spirit of God in its meditation. The 
teacher with authority in religion is the qualified 
witness, he who has had direct intuition of the truth 
he affirms. The scribes but restate the testimony 
of others ; they add nothing to the truth, they 
rather weaken it by repetition and inadequate 
statement. He only speaks with authority who 
tells what he has seen with his own independent 
vision, the truth he has reproduced in his own 
mind, the truth which flesh and blood have not 
revealed, but the living God. The truth thus ob- 
tained is not necessarily new, in the sense that the 
like had never been said before ; but it is new in 



AUTHORITIES AND SCRIBES. 25 

the sense of having been new-born in the thought 
of him who declares it. That makes it as fresh as 
the morning, the ever-new surprise of a new day. 

Such teachers we call "seers," signifying thereby 
that they see what they teach. Of such seeing the 
first and most essential condition is unconditional 
surrender to the truth. With the scribe the first 
consideration is not what is true, but what is writ- 
ten, vouched, accredited, or else what is profitable, 
what is best fitted to build up our denomination, to 
strengthen our church; not what saith the Spirit 
speaking to me this day, but what says the confer- 
ence, what says the platform, the covenant, the 
catechism ; what has credit with the churches, what 
is good ecclesiastical stock. But they whom God 
has destined to be his witnesses — authorities not 
for a day or a sect, but for all time — listen to no 
secondary teaching. They settle on no platform, 
they stop at no intermediate stage ; they go straight 
to the Fountain, and listen in their souls to what 
God shall declare to them concerning himself. 
They believe that God will speak to them also, if 
they really wish to hear ; that is, they believe in 
a present, living God, not merely in the God of 
long ago. They deliver themselves up without 
reserve to the truth ; they open mind and heart to 
God's teaching, asking not what is profitable, what 
say the scribes, but what saith the Spirit.- " Speak, 



26 AUTHORITIES AND SCRIBES. 

Lord, for thy servant heareth," is the constant 
frame of their waiting souls. 

No teacher acquires authority by his thought 
alone. No mere philosopher, however accepted in 
his day, can be permanent authority for the mass 
of mankind. Those old Greek sages, who said so 
many wise and beautiful things about duty and 
God, and were so conspicuous in their generation, — 
Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, and the rest, — what 
are they now ? What can they be to the multitude 
in every age but a vague impression of something 
far off and sublime, beyond the appreciation of 
ordinary minds, like those dim stars in the upper 
deep which astronomers tell us are luminous 
worlds, the centres of unknown systems, but which, 
so far as our senses can discern, are only faint 
specks requiring often artificial aid to make them 
perceptible. 

What the world requires in its spiritual leaders 
is not intellectual acuteness, but truth incarnate in 
the life. Such a leader, a teacher with authority, 
the Christian world acknowledges in its Founder. 
It finds him pre-eminent in those respects in which 
philosophers and philosophy fail. 

1. Universality. Jesus represents no school or 
epoch or race. He speaks a universal dialect, the 
dialect of the heart ; addressing himself not to a 
few select and disciplined natures, but to universal 



AUTHORITIES AND SCRIBES. 27 

man. " Come unto me, all ye that labor, and are 
heavy laden, and I will give you rest" " Whoso- 
ever drinketh of the water that I shall give him, 
shall never thirst ; but the water that I shall give 
him, shall be in him a well of water springing up 
into everlasting life." " He that believeth in me, 
though he were dead, yet shall he live." 

There is no philosophy here ; but what conscious- 
ness, what authority ! Who else ever uttered words 
like these ? Translatable into every idiom and 
losing little or nothing by translation, the words 
which were uttered so long ago in the solitudes of 
Galilee or the streets of Jerusalem are household 
words to-day in the remotest corners of the globe, 
endeared by daily use and consecrated by centuries 
of faith and worship, wholesome as daily bread, and 
still revered as bread from heaven. 

2. Next, the Christian world cherishes in Christ 
the element of stability. Other teachers arise and 
vanish with the rolling years. The sure foot of 
advancing time overtakes them, supplants them. 
New systems are demanded by new generations. 
The oracles of one age are dumb to the next. The 
voyager soon misses the familiar coast-lights that 
light him along his native shore. A few hours' 
sail withdraws their friendly blaze. But Sirius and 
Orion accompany him through all the meridians. 
Such are the lights of philosophic speculation, and 



28 AUTHORITIES AND SCRIBES. 

such the eternal truths of the Spirit to the journey- 
ing soul in its life-long voyage. The guides which 
seemed so infallible once have ceased to be in- 
fallible now, have ceased to edify. We have 
shifted our point of sight, and what was once a star 
has become the solitary candle of some plodding 
student no wiser than ourselves. We have as- 
cended into new regions, and what seemed to be 
celestial radiance as we looked up to it from be- 
neath, is meteor and mist as we look down upon 
it from above. We come to doubt at last whether 
any thought of philosopher or sage will continue to 
feed us, whether any light in literature will con- 
tinue to light us to the end. It is sad to lose our 
faith in teachers, but that is the price we pay for 
our growth. One by one we outgrow our idols, we 
come up with them and pass on. They were wise 
in their generation ; but the soul is wiser than all 
generations, and the Word from everlasting is 
wiser than the soul. 

3. Furthermore, the Christian world perceives in 
Jesus that Word made flesh. It is not the peculi- 
arity of the doctrine, but the quality of soul and the 
quantum of life in the Teacher, that makes him 
authority, and explains the epithet, " Son of Man." 
There was no new doctrine taught by Jesus. The 
Gospel contains no precept so peculiar, no moral 
so sublime, that the learned will not find you chap- 



AUTHORITIES AND SCRIBES. 29 

ter and verse of some Rabbi or ethnic philoso- 
pher where the same thing has been said before. 
The doctrine was not new, but the life was, — that 
wondrous life, so sharply relieved on the world's 
history, yet so intimately, ineradicably blended with 
it ; so near the ground, yet so lifted above the 
earth, in its humiliation drawing all men unto it; 
so exalted above human weakness, yet so pro- 
foundly sympathizing with it; so homely and so 
shining, so human and so divine ! 

Such was the authority of that one example that 
succeeding ages have been steeped in its baptism, 
and taken its name and confessed its law. Christen- 
dom with all its attainments, with its forces still 
growing, still unfolding, — the kingdom as wide as 
the circuit of the sun, — is the growth of that life. 
The history of Jesus is the history of one who sur- 
rendered himself entirely to the Truth. He gave 
himself without measure to the Spirit, and therefore 
without measure the Spirit was given to him. And 
because in him no care of self, and no infirmity of 
prejudice, and no bias of time or custom or institu- 
tion, and no view to present effect, and no fear of 
consequences, and no mere curiosity of the intellect, 
no conceit or fancy such as in other men wise and 
good, as in Plato and Swedenborg, mars the recep- 
tivity of the soul, — because in him nothing of this 
sort, no slightest barrier of privacy, hindered the 



30 AUTHORITIES AND SCRIBES. 

influx of the Spirit, — because the Godhead found 
in him a wholly permeable, translucent subject, — 
therefore he was absorbed in God, and God imper- 
sonated in him, so that he and the Father were one; 
and virtue and divinity went out of him when he 
acted and spoke, and his action was miracle and 
his word revelation, and act and word have sacra- 
mented succeeding ages, and the piety unfathomable 
of that one life still floats the world. 

On a lower plane, in a lesser degree, other spirits 
in diverse times have impersonated some truth or 
doctrine, have identified themselves with it, so that 
it has come to be the meaning and idea of their life. 
So Paul inclined his ear to the Spirit, and heard God 
say to him that the ceremonial law of Judaism had 
been fulfilled and superseded in Christ. Accord- 
ingly the life of Paul means deliverance from ritual 
bondage. In a later age Luther, meditating the 
errors and corruptions and spiritual wants of his 
time, received in himself the assurance that pen- 
ances and pilgrimages and fasts have no saving 
power ; and the life of Luther means salvation by 
faith. The life of George Fox means the gift of the 
Spirit to all who believe. The life of Swedenborg 
means the correspondence of natural objects with 
spiritual truths. The life of Channing represents 
the dignity and sacredness of human nature. 

On the whole, we may say that truth is the only 



AUTHORITIES AND SCRIBES. 31 

authority. He only speaks with authority who has 
that, and has it at first hand, who shows me the 
truth I had never seen before, or who makes me 
see it as I had never seen it before. And truth 
once seen may be safely left to its own operation. It 
needs no rhetoric to set it off ; it needs no enforce- 
ment to give it effect. When the geometrician has 
demonstrated his proposition that the angles of a 
triangle are equal to two right angles, he does not 
proceed to enforce it by appeals to sentiment and 
passion, he uses no rhetoric to set it off. What 
should we think of the geometrician who should 
conclude his demonstration by addressing our sym- 
pathies, and earnestly adjuring us by every motive 
of interest, of self-respect, of good-will to mankind, 
to admit that things are as they are. His only argu- 
ment is the fact which he proves. Why may not 
moral truth in like manner be left to itself ? What 
can be so powerful as just itself ? All that we can 
do for it is to make it appear. " Show us " the 
Truth, " and it sufficeth." 

But let us understand that truth is progressive, — 
I mean, truth in religion. The truths of geometry, 
which express the immutable relations of space, 
are unchangeable. A proposition in mathematics 
which was true six thousand years ago is just as true 
now, and will be six thousand years hence. The re- 
lations of angles and curves are the same from age 



32 AUTHORITIES AND SCRIBES. 

to age. But the relations of spirit change. The 
world of spirit advances, and as it advances brings 
new points of view ; and with new points of view come 
new views of the same objects, differing from the 
old, yet equally true, — I should say, more true than 
the old are now. The objects are the same, but are 
differently seen, as the same fixed star has a differ- 
ent relative position as the earth advances in its 
annual course. Propositions in theology need to 
be reconsidered from time to time ; the creed which 
was true for the ninth century is not true for the 
nineteenth, and many who spoke with authority 
then have ceased to be authority now. And yet 
the genuine teacher, speaking not from the plane 
of current beliefs, but out of the fulness of the 
Spirit, speaks with authority to all time. There 
are voices which never can become mute. There 
are forces over which time has no power ; for time 
did not make them, but they time. Existing 
forms, organizations, creeds may become obsolete. 
Once they were new ; now they are old. But the 
Spirit which gave them birth, though older than 
the oldest as measured by the scale of earthly 
years, is newer than the newest, and can never be 
outgrown. It was in the world before it took the 
Christian name, and will never be out of it what- 
ever name it may take. Christian it will always be 
in the true and eternal import of that name. For 



AUTHORITIES AND SCRIBES. 33 

the ever-living Spirit, and not an historic individual, 
is the true Christ, — the same yesterday, to-day, and 
forever. Systems pass, theologies slide, and au- 
thorities whose sphere and function were merely 
dogmatic, the authorities of the schools, are author- 
ities no longer. But goodness is the same in all 
generations. The authority of a good life can 
never become obsolete, can never fail to teach with 
effect. Let us not think so poorly of the business 
of teaching as to fancy it confined to word of mouth 
or the written page, or deem that they only in- 
struct and admonish and persuade who speak with 
words of wisdom and rhetorical art. 

If we trace the influences which have acted most 
powerfully on our moral nature, we shall find that 
it is not the teachers by profession that have doue 
the most and the best to shape our life, but the 
characters we conversed with, the daily life and 
conversation of our fellow-men. And the best 
influences and instruction have come from those 
beneath us, quite as often as from those above us 
in culture and understanding and the social scale. 
The most diligent student of us all will confess, I 
think, that he has learned more from life than from 
books, — from public and private examples of use- 
fulness and worth. The conscientious and labori- 
ous father of a family, the patient, self-sacrificing 
wife and mother, the devoted child, the faithful and 

3 



34 AUTHORITIES AND SCRIBES. 

painstaking servant in our employ, — these are 
our teachers, better than all homilies, more con- 
vincing than any treatise. Authorities they are, 
unquestionable and commanding. Not quotable in 
literature, inasmuch as teaching by word was not 
their function, but authority such as the soul that 
considers them cannot choose but accept. I con- 
fess the majesty of unconscious goodness in some 
obscure individual has more impressed me than 
any page of Jeremy Taylor or Saint Augustine. 
Compared with this silent authority, my favorite 
teachers were but scribes. And I sometimes think 
what a different standard of authority and dignity 
the angels may have from that received among 
men. You remember whom Jesus pronounced 
authorities on three separate occasions, — in the 
matter of practical well-doing, the unknown citizen 
of a country held in abhorrence and contempt ; in 
the matter of liberality, a poverty-stricken widow ; 
in the matter of spiritual greatness, a little child. 

It is truth alone that teaches with authority, 
whether bodied in words or deeds. Be obedient to 
the truth which you see and know ; live that truth, 
be that truth, and you will be, so far as that truth 
is concerned, authority to all who come within your 
sphere. Without word-wisdom or excellency of 
speech, you will preach more impressively than 
sermon or book. 



III. 

THE LESSON OF FLOWEKS. 

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow ; they 
toil not, neither do they spin : and yet I say unto you 
that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like 
one of these. Matt. vi. 28. 

TF the Bible were struck out of existence to-mor- 
"^ row and not a copy of it left to any library 
or any household, there are sayings of Jesus which 
would long survive in the memory of Christendom ; 
and this is one of them. No saying is more likely 
to survive than this which speaks to the heart with 
such a winsome grace ; it brings the great Teacher 
so near, so domesticates him in the natural world 
of our experience, — the out-door world which the 
spring is now transfiguring with a new dispensa- 
tion of rejoicing life. 

How touching this benediction of natural beauty 
from the Son of Man, — the Spirit's tribute to 
Nature, his great ally ! For who so in league with 
Nature as Jesus ? Who ever owed less to books 
and the past ? He used these only to prove to 



36 THE LESSON OF FLOWERS. 

those who assailed him with their traditions how 
they missed the spirit of the Scripture in their 
worship of the letter. With simple and unpreju- 
diced hearers he reasoned always from actual life 
as it passed before his eyes. His scriptures were 
birds and flowers, earth and sky, men, women, and 
children, objects and interests new as the dawn, 
and older than all the traditions of the world. He 
spoke as a living man to living men, with no school 
doctrine, but in lessons gleaned by a fresh, clear 
eye, which made the world seem fresh about him, as 
if he were the first that had appeared in its scenes. 
When the people looked for dogmas, he gave them 
things ; when they looked for forms, he gave them 
spirit; instead of the past, he drew from the pres- 
ent. The first object that met his eye, the fact of 
the moment, was his theme. All Nature was trans- 
lated into parable for their instruction. Whatever 
he handled became, by the mark which he put upon 
it, a new creation. His hearers could not analyze 
the charm of his teaching ; they knew not the se- 
cret of his power. The only account they could 
give of it, comparing him with other teachers, was 
that " he taught them as one having authority, and 
not as the scribes." What scribe or doctor of the 
Law would have deigned to discourse of lilies, un- 
less it were the carved ones of the Temple col- 
umns ? The scribes and doctors were too intent 






THE LESSON OF FLOWERS. 37 

on their phylacteries to think of flowers, or to find 
any comfort in their immunities and splendors. 
They could talk of the glory of Solomon far away 
in the past, for that was in their books, — a part 
of the national tradition ; but the glory all around 
them, the glory of the flowers of the field, had no 
meaning or charm for them. One jot or tittle of 
the Law was more to them than all the beauty of 
earth and sky. 

The Hebrew people have been charged with a 
want of appreciation of the beautiful in Nature, 
in which it is said they differ from the Greeks. 
The difference, I suspect, is not so great as has 
been represented. The fact is, none of the an- 
cient nations had that feeling for Nature so char- 
acteristic of the modern mind, — the feeling which 
breathes from the canvas of Turner and the strains 
of such poets as Wordsworth and our own Bryant. 
This feeling is essentially modern, Christian ; due 
in great part to the Christian sense of the imme- 
diate presence of God in Nature. It is true, how- 
ever, that the Hebrew mind had apparently less 
sympathy with the beautiful in Nature than with 
the awful and sublime. Rugged cliffs and craggy 
mountain-peaks seem to have best suited those 
stern spirits, with their abrupt monotheism. With 
the exception of some passages in the Psalms and 
the Canticles, there is no expression of delight 



38 THE LESSON OF FLOWERS. 

in natural beauty in their scriptures. The more 
remarkable and all the more welcome is this ex- 
pression from the lips of Jesus, the consummate 
flower of the Hebrew race, — proof of the more 
than Hebrew spirit that dwelt in him, of the mind 
transcending all nationality, comprehending the 
sympathies of universal man, and illustrating the 
fitness of the title " Son of Man." 

Consider the lilies, how they grow ! The lilies 
had been there from the days of the conquest, but 
where the heart to feel and the mind to interpret 
their beauty ? Year after year they had come in 
their season and starred the fields with their bright 
array, but who had thought them worth consider- 
ing? Kings and chiefs returning from slaughter 
had stalked remorseless through their ranks, war's 
unheeding foot had trod upon their cups, priest 
and Levite had passed them by, and none ever pon- 
dered how they grow, or paused to study their 
hidden moral. But when Jesus came he exalted 
the neglected wild-flower, and set it above the 
splendor of courts. 

" And in the bosom of its purity, 
A voice he set as in a temple shrine, 
That life's quick travellers ne'er might pass it by 
Unwarned of that sweet influence divine." 

The flowers which Jesus praised, — not lilies, as 
we understand that term, but a gorgeous wild- 



THE LESSON OF FLOWERS. 39 

flower which still enamels the plains of Palestine, 
— the flowers which Jesus praised are not native 
to our clime , but the same Nature from which the 
great Teacher drew is present here and lovely 
here, if not so luxuriant as seen under Syrian 
skies ; the flowers which gladden our own fields, 
if not so gay, are as dainty and as full of signifi- 
cance as those of Palestine. And now that we are 
once more comforted and blessed with these yearly 
visitants, now that spring-blossoms glorify the 
landscape once more, I am moved in the spirit of 
this Scripture to draw from Nature for our in- 
struction, and to follow the Master in a lesson 
of flowers. 

Consider the lilies, how they grow! Consider 
first their essential beauty, the delicate texture of 
their silken petals, their varied forms of grace, the 
tender promise of the folded bud, the faultless 
rhythm of the full-blown flower, the splendor of 
their tints, and the grateful incense of their balmy 
breath. Beautiful they are; but why are they, 
and what is their use ? The answer is, Beauty. 
Beauty is for us all their being's end. Their only 
or chief function, so far as man is concerned, is 
to please the eye, and through the eye to refresh 
and make glad the heart. Here is a lesson for 
the Christian moralist ; here is a revelation of the 
mind of God. Beauty is use, and an end in itself. 



40 THE LESSON OF FLOWERS. 

Beauty is divine. This is a truth which theology 
has yet to learn and apply. Something of the 
Hebrew sternness and alleged indifference to nat- 
ural beauty has passed into Christian theology. 
The saints of the Church have looked on beauty 
as idle vanity or carnal satisfaction. The early 
painters rejected it from their portraits. The 
Fathers of the desert ruled it out of their scheme 
of life. The less of beauty, they thought, the 
more of holiness, the more of spirit. The English 
hermit in his island fastness walled up the win- 
dow of his hermitage, shutting out the magnificent 
prospect which disturbed, he said, his communion 
with God, — as if God were less present in his own 
creation than within the wails of a cell. The Jes- 
uits of Granada boasted of their father Sanchez, 
that though the monastery in which he lived had 
a beautiful garden, he never looked at a single 
flower. Calvin in romantic Geneva cherished his 
doctrine of despair, and exhibits no trace in his 
writings of any influence on his heart of the Al- 
pine glories which surrounded him, no sign that 
his spirit had ever been soothed by the contem- 
plation of Lake Leman, or kindled at beholding 
the snow-peaks blush and glow in the rosy light of 
sunset. Christian theologians have written books 
to prove that Nature is blasted and corrupt, a de- 
formity and ruin, accursed by God in consequence 



THE LESSON OF FLOWERS. 41 

of man's transgression. I find nothing in the 
sayings of Christ that gives countenance to such 
a doctrine. Surely Jesus knows nothing of a 
blasted Nature. Nature to him is no ruin, but 
the realm of order and peace and blessing, the 
vestiture of spirit, the very presence of the infinite 
Father. Every flower that blows refutes the impi- 
ous doctrine of a ruined Nature with its eye of 
grace. Every flower bears witness of law and 
order and loving obedience. 

The first lesson taught by flowers is the sacred 
significance of beauty, — the place which beauty 
occupies in the scheme of things. They teach that 
" beauty is its own excuse for being," that the 
world is not a system of bare necessities and dry- 
utilities, that man is not to live by bread alone. 
What would the world be if all the flowers were 
out of it, if all the graces and charms of life were 
expunged ? Civilization is based on the love of 
beauty more than on the grosser satisfactions of 
life. The savage has meat, clothes, fire, under 
normal conditions enough to eat and drink, a shel- 
ter from the cold, a place to lay his head, and all 
the grosser satisfactions of life. What has the 
cultured prosperous citizen that the child of the 
forest has not ? First and chiefly, beauty. Animal 
satisfaction is common to both ; the accompanying 
grace is peculiar to the former. Instead of the 



42 THE LESSON OF FLOWERS. 

rude wigwam, the tapestried drawing-room; in- 
stead of food snatched from the hearth where it 
is cooked, the service of the table ; instead of the 
shaggy hide and unkempt locks, the decent robe 
and the comely, trim array. These principally 
distinguish the civilized man from the savage. 
To brute necessity civilization adds grace. The 
greater part of the callings and business of society 
relates to the maintenance and perfection of this 
grace. The sense of beauty is the mainspring of 
civilization. Take away this and you abolish the 
difference between the troglodyte and the gentle- 
man. God implanted the sense of beauty in us to 
be our educator and civilizer. Through the sense 
of beauty he says to us perpetually, " Come up 
higher! " And he feeds that sentiment by his own 
benign action with all that is beautiful in his crea- 
tions, and most of all with flowers. In them we 
have a subtle proof of divine beneficence. They 
express the riches of that Love which provides for 
the fancy as well as the flesh, and while nourish- 
ing the body with necessary food entertains the 
mind with ethereal bread. A love less tender 
would have given the needful fruits without the 
superfluous flowers. These are the finer expres- 
sions of the Infinite good-will, the dearer tokens of 
the Father's love. 

But this is not all that their beauty teaches. 



THE LESSON OF FLOWERS. 43 

That is a partial and narrow view of creation 
which considers it as destined only for the use of 
man, and all the wondrous and beautiful things in 
it as ministering only to human enjoyment. Are 
there then no flowers but those which mortals see ? 
Did the earth first take her robe of beauty to grat- 
ify her human offspring ? Was there no Eden till 
man was placed in it, and none after man was 
expelled ? Were the prairies of Illinois naked 
loam till the children of the new world looked 
on their vast expanse ? Had Massachusetts no 
mayflowers till the Pilgrims landed ? Did the 
peerless Victoria, resting her broad leaves on the 
Amazon, delay to blossom till Humboldt and 
Schomburgk were there to see ? Doubtless there 
were flowers before the- birth of man. Doubtless 
the Creator has his own delight in these creatures, 
and has planted them far from mortal ken, in 
mountain rifts and inaccessible rock clefts where 
only the chamois and eagle see, on desert islands 
and in secret nooks where no eye but his can re- 
joice in their beauty, and would have planted them 
none the less if the human race had never been 
called into being, if Adam and all his progeny had 
been omitted from the scheme of things. They 
are his fancy, his sport, the exuberance and frolic 
of the spirit. They express the deep joy of God in 
his creative energy. Man, never sufficient to him- 



44 THE LESSON OF FLOWERS. 

self, vain man requires the stimulus of recognition 
and admiring response. He will not do his best 
unless he can count upon witnesses, eye-witnesses 
or ear-witnesses, present or to come. Imagine even 
Shakspeare composing a drama that was never to 
be acted or read, or Handel a chorus that was 
never to be sung. But Nature craves no admirers, 
solicits no witnesses, and works as cheerily and as 
wondrously in the heart of the wilderness as in 
public haunts. She even multiplies her choicest 
products in secret dells and pathless wilds, surpris- 
ing the chance wanderer with unexpected marvels 
of beauty, but not caring that any wanderer should 
find her out. An admonition to man, that of 
human products also, the choicest and fairest are 
the fruit of retirement. The best that life yields, 
the dearest blessings, flourish in private. They are 
crushed in the sharp collision, or frittered away in 
the long attrition of public converse. The high- 
ways for business ; the city and the court for glory 
and gain, for the race of ambition and the chase of 
fortune. But the flower of contentment blooms, 
if at all, in private gardens, in the bosom of home, in 
the solitudes of the spirit. Sought thus and there, it 
springs for all, and often most luxuriantly in scenes 
of the poorest promise. The apparent difference 
in the human condition is monstrous ; the actual 
difference, the difference in solid satisfaction, is 



THE LESSON OF FLOWERS. 45 

comparatively small. There are none so ill pro- 
vided but life will occasionally yield them flowers. 
Wherever there is a healthy nature, wherever there 
are innocence and kind affections, there are flowers. 
The same all-present bounty that gave to the trop- 
ics the cactus and the palm, has clothed our 
northern hillsides with the anemone and the vio- 
let ; and the same beneficent law which gives to 
genius glory and fame, appoints for the meek and 
lowly peace. 

Of flowers consider, further, the infinite variety, 
— a variety no science can express and no text- 
books exhaust. Botany enumerates classes and 
orders ; but the species how diverse, and no two 
individuals even of any one species exactly alike. 
Consider this, ye pedagogues and system-makers, 
and from it learn how futile, how contrary to all 
the analogies of Nature are all your attempts 
to make human beings think and act alike. This 
seems to be the aim of most of the systems of edu- 
cation and of church polity which have been pro- 
pounded and gained acceptance in the world, — to 
make men think and act alike. Such systems 
mistake the true method of growth and the end of 
life. The method of growth is not the same for all ; 
and the end, which in one sense is the same for 
all, — that is, the unfolding of each one's better 
nature and progress in all good, — is not to be 



46 THE LESSON OF FLOWERS. 

accomplished in the same way by all. If vegetable 
nature without the power of self-determination ex- 
hibits such diversity, what ought to be expected of 
human nature with that additional element ! The 
truth is, there are needed as many systems of edu- 
cation as there are beings to be educated ; and 
God, the supreme educator, pursues a different 
system. with each. Preposterous the demand that 
every individual shall be a reproduction of some 
approved model, though it were the highest. As 
well demand that every flower shall be a tulip 
or a rose. Had it been the Creator's design that 
human nature in all should conform to a given 
model, the same endowments would have happened 
to all, and a single pattern would have been or- 
dained by which men should mould in all respects 
their character and life. But as no such copy has 
been set, — for the highest, even Christ, is a model in 
principle only, not in detail, — as no such copy has 
been set, and as no such uniform endowment ap- 
pears, it is evident that God intended the same 
variety in the rational world which pervades the 
irrational ; he intended that man should differ from 
man as one flower differs from another in glory. 
There are good and evil qualities, there are true 
and false styles, as in Nature there are wholesome 
and noxious plants. The evil and false must be 
rooted out; but within the limits of health and 



THE LESSON OF FLOWERS. 47 

truth there is infinite scope for self-determination 
and individuality. Each individual has his own 
proper type, and the best development for each 
is that which accords with his individuality. A 
perfect society is not one in which all attain the 
same growth and exhibit the same aspect, but one 
in which, like the flowers of the field, each is devel- 
oped according to his type. Moreover, as each has 
his own individual nature, so in each there is a 
nature common to all, — the moral nature, which 
connects him with the highest. This each is 
bound to unfold in his life ; and as every flower 
represents the whole of Nature in miniature, so 
every finite spirit should aim to represent the uni- 
versal Spirit, to express the divine idea of man, to 
enact the divine-human in his proper sphere. 

Let our contemplation of flowers consider, lastly, 
the law of their being, — " how they grow." What 
distinguishes the life of plants is closeness to Na- 
ture, expressed in tenacity of place. They have 
their root in the earth ; they are fixed to the soil, 
and perish if divorced from the sod. Man has a 
larger scope in his power of locomotion and choice 
of place ; but man too is a child of Nature, and can 
flourish only by strict adherence to Nature's hold. 
We too are bound to earth. Spirits though we be, 
we have our root in the clod. We are animated 
earth, and though not bound to a given spot we 



48 THE LESSON OF FLOWERS. 

are bound to the parent mass by indissoluble ties. 
We can act only by means of the organism with 
which we are endowed, and that organism is apt 
and available only in strict accordance with Nature's 
law. Close to Nature is the rule for man as well 
as flower. Just so far as we depart from Nature 
in our methods and aims, we lose our way and 
miss our end. 

I have followed the leading of the Gospel and 
the season in attempting to interpret the lesson of 
the flowers. Some of their aspects I have sought 
to represent, but who can translate into speech the 
bloom of Nature or formulate in words the glory 
and savor of the wood and the field ? Nature to 
be known must be studied face to face. The single 
flower is of brief duration ; the single blossom is 
more transient still. The flowers that now glad 
the eye are not the same with those which breathed 
the annual greeting of other years, reminding us 
sadly of human flowers, the beloved of our heart, 
the joy of our life, that have perished from us with 
the autumn leaf and come not again. But God is 
faithful : he takes much, but he gives more ; and 
Nature reproduces herself continually. Think what 
changes have passed over Palestine since these 
words of Jesus, " Consider the lilies," were uttered 
there. The Jewish theocracy with its sumptuous 
ritual has gone out ; the Jewish temple, the pride of 



THE LESSON OF FLOWERS. 49 

Zion, has been levelled with the ground. Roman 
and Greek, Saracen and Frank, have occupied in 
turn the land of sacred story " over whose acres 
walked those blessed feet," and planted their faiths 
and altars there. Hardly the curious traveller de- 
tects here and there some doubtful trace of the an- 
cient time. But the lilies of the field, the same in 
kind that blossomed in the Sermon on the Mount, 
are there still, fresh and glorious as when Jesus 
praised their shining raiment ; and still they preach 
to thoughtful minds the same moral which Jesus 
drew from their silent beauty. Man and man's 
doings appear and vanish ; momentary bubbles on 
the great world-stream, — they were and are not. 
But Nature is constant, — the ancient of days, still 
young in her age's lateness as in creation's prime ; 
still, in all her varying phases, the same from age 
to age ; the image of eternity ;. the visible presence 
of the Invisible, who in her and through her speaks 
to us still, as spoke his beloved Son, and by all the 
beauty and all the marvels of his creation and all 
the graces and beatitudes of life, is seeking only and 
always to win us to himself. 



IV. 

NOTHING TO DEAW WITH. 

Sir, thou hast nothing to draw with, and the well is 
deep : from whence then hast thou that living water ? 

John iv. 11. 

LIVING water meant one thing to the woman 
of Samaria and another thing to the Son of 
Man. Such different associations have different 
minds with the same objects, the same words. 
What a different thing is this visible world to dif- 
ferent classes of its occupants ! To one it is a series 
of phenomena which come and go like pictures in 
a diorama, and mean nothing more. To another it 
is a round of personal experiences, important only 
as they affect him pleasantly or otherwise. To a 
philosopher like Newton it is a chain of causes and 
effects expressive of natural laws. To a Spiritual- 
ist like Jacob Boehme or Swedenborg it is a book 
of parables, or a manual of symbols and corre- 
spondences expressive of spiritual truths. 

Day by day the sun rises and sets. The common 
eye sees nothing but a shining ball pervading the 






NOTHING TO DRAW WITH. 51 

heavens, a convenient arrangement for lighting and 
warming our earthly day ; Laplace saw a world 
on fire ; King David saw a divine commandment, 
" enlightening the eyes and rejoicing the heart ; " 
Zoroaster saw Divinity itself enthroned in light. 

Jesus and his companions were seated at table. 
The disciples saw nothing but bread and wine ; the 
Master saw the flesh and blood of a new age. 

And so by the well of Sychar, where the woman 
of Samaria can see no living water but the cooling 
element that sparkles in her bucket, the Son of 
Man is conscious of a spiritual element springing 
up into everlasting life. 

The scene at Sychar is daily renewed. Life is 
that well where spiritual and worldly meet to- 
gether in a common necessity. To some it is a 
well of temporary refreshment ; to some of everlast- 
ing satisfaction. Some thirst for one thing, some 
for another ; but all thirst, — all seek satisfaction 
of one or another kind. And satisfaction is neces- 
sary to all. So necessary is it to the sustentation 
of life, that the soul must perish if that nutriment 
be long withheld. So necessary is it, that the soul 
creates it for itself in the way of hope when denied 
it in the way of reality. So necessary is it that 
when in the lot of another no satisfactions are 
visible to us we are puzzled to know how such a 
one lives. He has nothing that would nourish or 



52 NOTHING TO DRAW WITH. 

comfort us, — nothing to draw with that we can 
see, — and yet he is happy. Whence has he that 
living water? 

Let no man measure another's resources by the 
contents of his own dipper. When the Son of 
Man came weary and thirsty, and sat down in his 
humility by Jacob's well, he seemed no doubt a 
pitiable object to the woman of Samaria who came 
thither to draw water. She thought herself the 
more fortunate of the two. " Sir, thou hast noth- 
ing to draw with, and the well is deep." But a 
little conversation undeceived her ; she found their 
relative position reversed. The need was hers ; 
the fulness his. 

Life is a well where all in various ways seek 
comfort and delight. The satisfaction we find in it 
will depend on what we bring to it, on the nature of 
the good we seek, on our views and expectations of 
life, on what we draw with. He who brings nothing 
but selfish appetite will find nothing else. He will 
find it an everlasting thirsting again ; unsatisfied 
desire will be his lot. For when was appetite ever 
satisfied ? " Enough " is a word unknown in the 
vocabulary of desire. Whatever the direction and 
special object of desire, if private advantage be the 
only end contemplated, disappointment will be the 
end experienced. The result will be no enduring 
satisfaction, but increased thirst. 



NOTHING TO DRAW WITH. 53 

The lowest object which desire can propose to 
itself is pleasure. Pleasure is one of the goods of 
life, but an incidental one ; it comes in the train of 
other good, like the fragrance which attends a 
wholesome fruit ; it is not to be had by making it 
a special object of pursuit, and he who has nothing 
to draw with but love of pleasure will soon cease to 
draw even that. Our capacity for enjoyment — I 
mean sensational enjoyment — is the most limited 
of all our capacities. It is limited by the constitu- 
tion of our own being on one side, and the constitu- 
tion of external nature on the other. We can have 
but so many pleasant sensations in a given time ; 
so many and no more compose our daily bread. 
By no art or device, by no resources of wealth, by 
no felicity of circumstance, can the number be made 
to exceed in any considerable degree what is ordi- 
narily experienced by healthy natures, with no ad- 
vantage of fortune and without seeking. And 
limited as is our capacity in that kind, the appetite 
for pleasure is oftener dulled by satiety and baffled 
by disgust than satisfied by an adequate amount of 
realized enjoyment. For this is remarkable in man, 
that with an appetite " like fire or like the grave," 
his susceptibility of pleasure is dependent on two 
or three bundles of nerves of fragile texture and 
very precarious service, good for so much and no 
more in the healthiest state, and sure to give out 



54 NOTHING TO DRAW WITH. 

if overworked. Of sensual enjoyment the fact is 
notorious. Here the limits are proverbially close ; 
pleasure indulged to excess impairs the organs 
through which pleasure is derived. The nerves 
are unstrung, the senses are jaded, the members 
refuse to perform their function; all relish de- 
parts out of life. We read of a royal voluptuary 
who offered a reward to one. who should invent a 
new sensation. I am not aware that the prize 
was ever claimed. Many a despot who figures in 
history has been reduced to this strait, — a king- 
dom and nothing to draw with ; a thousand ser- 
vants at command and no satisfaction to be had ; 
lord of unlimited wealth, and not a drop to drink ! 
The cynic who threw away the useless luxury of 
a cup on seeing a beggar drink from the hollow 
of his hand had a better command of the well 
of life and richer draughts from its depths 
than the emperor whose suppers impoverished 
nations. 

Life is poor when used in this way, — poor as a 
draught of selfish satisfactions. There is no aim, 
I say, which a man can propose to himself so im- 
practicable as the effort to make existence an unin- 
terrupted series of enjoyments. When we reflect 
how many things must concur to furnish a single 
day of unalloyed pleasure ; how every string in the 
many-stringed instrument of the human frame 



NOTHING TO DRAW WITH. 55 

must be tuned to the exact pitch of pleasant sen- 
sation ; how the slightest irritation of a single nerve, 
an aching tooth, or a mote in the eye may convert 
recreation into torture ; how all the accidents of 
time and place, the faces and spirits of our compan- 
ions, and all the elements of the circle in which we 
move must conspire to aid or not to molest, — the 
wonder is that ever a day of unqualified enjoyment 
should fall to the lot of man. " It is in vain that 
a man says to himself, < Go to now, I will prove thee 
with mirth/ The order of Nature has not been con- 
sulted in that arrangement, nor is it considered 
how small a portion of our enjoyment depends on 
our own wills, and how much on the will of God, 
who often says, ' Go to now, I will prove thee with 
plagues and sorrows.' " * Nature consults the hap- 
piness of the individual no further than the hap- 
piness of the individual consists with the good of 
the whole. Regardless of individual wishes, in- 
exorable and immutable, she pursues her appointed 
course, giving us often clouds for sunbeams, drought 
for rain, famine for plenty, and tumult for rest ; 
frustrating our wisest plans, disappointing our 
fondest hopes, making us pine with sickness and 
writhe with pain, taking from us our dearest, — 
goods and friends and all the promise and joy of 
life, — and hurrying us on to the grave with a 

* Sydney Smith. 



56 NOTHING TO DRAW WITH. 

power which no prayers can avert and no wisdom 
stay. 

Life is niggard of private and far-sought delights. 
The best and surest satisfactions are those which 
are common to all, and which come without seek- 
ing, — the perennial feast of Nature, the golden sun- 
light, the balmy air of summer days, the pleasant 
face of earth and sky, books and friends, and the 
sweet consuetudes of daily life. These are man's 
common, natural food; and all attempts to re- 
fine upon these or to supersede them with more 
exquisite enjoyments are a search after the impos- 
sible, and impoverish at last, instead of enriching 
our mortal estate. Add to all this the secret self- 
upbraidings which even the most frivolous cannot 
wholly escape, — the latent conviction that life is 
not the Vanity Fair they have sought to make it, 
that life was given for quite other purposes than 
selfish gratification, and that he who has nothing 
but amusement to show for his opportunities has 
lived in vain. 

This is the lesson taught by that melancholy 
book, — most melancholy of all time, the Book of 
Ecclesiastes. We have there a picture, after the 
life, of the jaded and disappointed voluptuary. No 
vulgar pleasure-seeker, but a thoughtful, curious, 
critical voluptuary is portrayed. A monarch fur- 
nished with the amplest resources of fortune, a 



NOTHING TO DRAW WITH. 57 

philosopher endowed with the largest gifts of mind, 
goes deliberately about to satisfy a craving appetite, 
and devotes all his genius and all his vast means 
to discover the secret of happiness, " till I might 
see," he says, " what was that good for the sons 
of men." He fails, as all before him and all since 
have failed, to find the satisfaction thus sought, 
and records the story of his failure in the sad con- 
fession of a wasted life. " Nothing to draw with, 
and the well is deep," is the doleful record and 
everlasting moral of Ecclesiastes. 

Appetite has other objects than the love of 
pleasure. Let us view it in its nobler manifesta- 
tions ; for example, in the love of knowledge. 
The pursuit of knowledge is certainly a worthier 
aim than enjoyment, and less likely to disappoint 
the seeker. But when knowledge is sought in the 
way of private satisfaction, with no motive but 
curiosity, with no view to the supreme truth and 
good, with no lofty aspiration, with no reference to 
human weal, it is but a selfish appetite, after all, 
which prompts that pursuit, more rational and re- 
fined than the love of pleasure, but subject to the 
same law and liable to the same doom. Like all 
other appetites, it is insatiable, and though free 
from the weary satiety which follows sensual enjoy- 
ment, it is equally incapable of supplying a perfect 
and enduring satisfaction. It is not living water, 



58 NOTHING TO DRAW WITH. 

of which whosoever drinketh shall thirst no more ; 
on the contrary, it is but a temporary satisfaction, 
which one may relish to-day and be none the hap- 
pier for to-morrow. 

I do not find that learned men and philosophers 
have been particularly blessed above all others. I 
do not find that with all their discoveries they have 
hit upon the secret of multiplying pleasant sensa- 
tions, or what is more to the purpose, of avoiding 
painful ones. I know of no geographer or scientific 
traveller who has found in either of the five zones 
that happy valley in which he could set up his ever- 
lasting rest. I know of no astronomer who could 
find a heaven for himself among the heavenly bodies 
which he knew and named, or secure the perihelion 
of an uninterrupted peace. I know of no chemist 
out of whose crucible has come the alkali that 
would discharge the disfiguring stains from mortal 
life, of no philosopher who could rid himself of his 
own shadow. I do not find that philosophers have 
been more able than other men to escape the bur- 
den of the common lot, or less ready than other 
men to throw off the burden and the grief by laying 
violent hands on themselves, and putting an abrupt 
period to their tale of woe. I find here an ancient 
sage anticipating his end because he is old and 
maimed, there a scholar deliberately walking out of 
life because of a humor in his eyes. The immortal 



NOTHING TO DRAW WITH. 59 

Newton, a great sufferer in his latter years, could 
find no comfort in those discoveries which had 
been the aim and glory of his life. Lagrange at 
one period was plunged in profound melancholy, 
and lost all relish for scientific pursuits. D'Alem- 
bert, who was similarly afflicted, pronounced exist- 
ence a misfortune. Boyle was driven to the verge 
of suicide by religious doubts. The learned and 
beautiful Maria Agnesi, the finished linguist, the 
profound mathematician, the most learned of 
women, sought refuge in a convent from a burden 
of gloom which no science could relieve. Hum- 
boldt gave vent to the unsuspected mortifications 
of daily life in the acerbities of private correspond- 
ence ; and Hugh Miller cut short with a pistol-shot 
the thread of a life imbittered with vain attempts 
to solve the problem of creation and to reconcile 
geological strata with the Book of Genesis. 

Here, too, the sad Ecclesiastes confirms our hom- 
ily : " And I gave my heart to seek and search out 
by wisdom concerning all things that are done un- 
der heaven. ... I have seen all the works that are 
done under the sun ; and behold, all is vanity and 
vexation of spirit. That which is crooked cannot 
be made straight : and that which is wanting can- 
not be numbered. . . . In much wisdom is much 
grief : and he that increaseth. knowledge increaseth 



60 NOTHING TO DRAW WITH. 

When moreover we reflect how little is known in 
comparison with the boundless unknown, how vast 
the realm of inquiry, how infinitesimal the province 
yet conquered by man or conquerable, and how 
all our discoveries amount to nothing but a little 
prying and peeping, glimpses through telescopes 
and microscopes, — what the Apostle calls seeing 
through a glass darkly, — there seems something 
tragic in science itself quite aside from the for- 
tunes of those who pursue it. The most learned 
have felt most profoundly their ignorance ; the 
most philosophic their incompetence. This one 
had only attained to know that he knew nothing, 
and that one had only picked up pebbles on the 
strand of an unexplored deep. 

The seeker after knowledge, no less than the 
pleasure-seeker, will often sit weary by the well, 
unsatisfied and forlorn. To science also the well is 
deep, and learning has nothing to draw with equal 
to craving Nature's need. 

And if knowledge will not satisfy the thirsting 
soul, still less can that thirst be assuaged with fame. 
The fame which most men seek is the idlest wind 
that blows. There is a fame, indeed, which savors 
of eternal life. The desire for that fame, the thirst 
for true glory and immortality, the wish to live and 
shine forever in the firmament of elect souls, is a 
rare and sublime passion which only minds of the 



NOTHING TO DRAW WITH. 61 

highest order are capable of entertaining. It is 
found only in connection with extraordinary powers, 
and is itself an earnest of immortality. I speak not 
of fame in this sense, but of present distinction, of 
popular applause. The ambition which contends 
for such prizes is born of vanity, and ends in vanity 
and vexation of spirit. This is a thirst which is 
never satisfied, and which has this peculiarity distin- 
guishing it from other passions, that its aim is not 
only selfish, but exclusive; it not only seeks its own 
regardless of others, but it seeks what others may 
not share, and is pained at others' success. Its own 
successes lose all their relish the moment another 
has more. And this is its everlasting penalty, — 
that when it thinks to secure its prize, behold, an- 
other has more. If merit were the gauge and con- 
dition of success, ambition would have at least an 
honorable career, if not a worthy aim. But this is 
a contest in which the race is not to the swift, nor 
the battle to the strong. Distinction is dear if 
honorably sought, and dearer still if obtained at 
the price of self-respect, but cheap enough to those 
who have no self-respect to compromise. It is 
easy to make one's self a name, if with ordinary 
powers a man will cast aside all scruple of delicacy 
and right, and strive for coarse effects. An uncriti- 
cal public is always ready with its breath to fill 
the sail that courts it, and to crown with its huz- 



62 NOTHING TO DRAW WITH. 

zas the hero of the hour. And so the hero of to- 
day is replaced by a new hero to-morrow. There 
never was an age when popular favor was dealt in 
the measure of desert, when the highest honor was 
secure to the highest excellence, when the faithful 
and laborious student, the able statesman, the con- 
summate artist, the thorough and conscientious 
worker in whatever department, could be sure of 
the recompense due to superior merit. It is not 
the wisest voice, but the loudest, — not the thinker, 
scholar, seer, but the shallow declaimer, — that 
wins the public ear. It is not the work of genius or 
profound learning, but the book that aims at popu- 
lar effect, that brings the largest and surest re- 
turns in public report. It is not the scientific 
physician, but the quack, whose cures are cele- 
brated. It is not the learned civilian or devoted 
patriot, but the noisy demagogue, whom the people 
choose for their representative and leader. Notori- 
ously in our American politics, it is not the fittest 
candidate, but the most available, whom parties 
designate for the highest place in the land. 

But suppose the race successful, and the prize, 
whatever it be, secured, what does it profit in the 
way of conscious enjoyment ? What amount of 
solid satisfaction is realized in it ? No good which 
mortals chase after is so purely imaginary as this 
" fancied life in others' breath." 



NOTHING TO DRAW WITH. 63 

" All that we feel of it begins and ends 
In the small circle of our foes and friends." 

Let a man work well for worthy ends and content 
himself with self-respect, with conscious excel- 
lence, with the favorable verdict of his peers, and 
his reward is sure ; but if he seek it in public honor 
and popular applause, he pursues a phantom and 
embraces a shadow. 

So whether it fail or whether it succeed in its 
special and immediate aim, the thirst which seeks 
satisfaction in distinction and applause, like every 
appetite that aims at private satisfaction, is a thirst- 
ing again. Whatever satisfactions attend it, they 
are not the living water that makes glad and se- 
rene, conscious of imperishable riches and craving 
nothing. 

Whence, then, has any soul that living water? 
Appetite has nothing to draw with, and the well is 
deep. What is the secret of that happiness which 
all crave as their proper nutriment and natural 
right? The Latin moralist made it to consist in 
health. The object of a wise man's prayer, he 
says, after showing the folly of all other wishes, 
should be a sound mind in a sound body. Un- 
questionably, health in that large sense which em- 
braces the mental with the bodily functions is the 
greatest of temporal blessings ; but health is not a 
thing which man can always command, or which 



64 NOTHING TO DRAW WITH. 

God will always vouchsafe to prayer, and when 
vouchsafed for a time, it is not an impregnable, 
imperishable good : it is liable to countless acci- 
dents ; a little thing may undermine it, — a little too 
much heat, a little too much cold, the exigencies of 
duty, unavoidable exposure, or an untoward event. 
And if it escape for two or three scores of years 
the manifold contingencies of life, it must yield at 
last to the slow decay of age. To the healthiest 
and most vigorous the time must come when the 
pitcher will be broken at the fountain and the 
wheel at the cistern, and when failing nature will 
have nothing to draw with, yet will feel as keenly 
as ever that the well is deep. Here then is a 
limit to the sovereign efficacy of health, beyond 
which the heathen moralist did not reach with 
his prescription. 

Another solution of the great problem is given 
by the Hebrew teacher already referred to in an- 
other connection. Ecclesiastes ends his melan- 
choly story with this " conclusion of the whole 
matter : Fear God, and keep his commandments : 
for this is the whole duty of man." Yes, a life 
of virtue, if one could accomplish it, a life of un- 
swerving obedience to divine commandments, — that 
is real, that is vital. Yet who by an effort of the 
will can lead a life of unswerving obedience ? Who 
even by taking heed thereto can wholly cleanse his 



NOTHING TO DRAW WITH. 65 

way s ? Who by sheer force of dogged resolution 
can fear God and keep his commandments ? Who 
can be saved by the works of the Law ? To this 
end obedience should be perfect and entire, wanting 
nothing. But u no man liveth and sinneth not;" 
and the greatest legalist among Christian teachers 
declares that "whosoever shall keep the whole law, 
and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all." But 
granting the ability, granting a possible salvation 
by works, this is not the salvation which satisfies 
man's deepest need ; it is not a draught that reaches 
the bottom of the well. I can suppose that one 
shall lead a blameless and virtuous life, and yet 
not know supreme content. For though it is true, 
as sages have taught and saws declare, that without 
virtue there is no happiness, it is not true that 
virtue in this sense is the highest and perfect 
blessedness. 

In what, then, consists that blessedness which 
neither health nor virtue can supply ? Where and 
what is that living water that answers to nature's 
uttermost need ? Tell us, some greater than Solo- 
mon, what to draw with ; for the well is deep. And 
a greater than Solomon has spoken : " He that 
loseth his life for my sake, shall find it." For my 
sake, — that is, for truth's sake, for duty's sake, for 
the sake of any real, permanent good. The secret 
of a blessed life is that we lose ourselves in some 

5 



66 NOTHING TO DRAW WITH. 

worthy cause or work. The root of all unhappi- 
ness lies in the thought of self. All desires that 
terminate in self, whether animal, intellectual, or 
even moral, renew and increase the everlasting 
thirst. It needs that desire be turned away from 
self and fixed on something without us, — something 
which is loved and sought for its own sake. The 
greater the object, the greater and more enduring 
the satisfaction. To lose ourselves in an infinite 
object is everlasting life. Can a man do this by 
simply willing it? Surely not; nor can the will 
to do so originate in a theoretical conviction. It 
needs something more than a true perception and 
a right resolve to bring about the union between 
the individual and an object worthy his deepest 
devotion. That is a marriage which is made in 
heaven. Only the grace of God can wed the soul 
with the absolute good. Yet it is something even 
to see the truth whose realization is everlasting 
life, and to know at least the self-delusion we are 
practising when we seek to quench with temporal 
satisfactions a thirst which only divine satisfac- 
tions can allay, although in our helplessness we 
continue to practise it. We are near awaking 
when we dream that we dream. 

The well is deep; but every unselfish pursuit 
dips into it, draws from it, and can never exhaust 
it. Happy the man who has an object in life, — 



NOTHING TO DRAW WITH. 67 

a work, a mission, which takes him completely 
out of himself. He has living water, and who- 
soever drinketh thereof shall never thirst. Of 
such objects there is no lack if one listens to the 
voice which speaks to every soul, u Go work to-day 
in my vineyard." Do you ask where the vineyard 
is in which the good Father bids us work ? It is 
no reserved spot, no plot set apart, fenced in and 
select ; it is man's ubiquitous abode. The vineyard 
is wherever good can be done or devised, — in the 
streets of the city, in its stores and counting-rooms 
and banks. It is on the decks of ships, in the sol- 
dier's bivouac, in the logger's camp, in your house 
and mine, in every scene of human life, wherever 
moral fruit can be gathered, wherever moral seed 
can be sown. They who are called to be laborers 
in that vineyard are the human family, one and 
all, — whoever is capable of teaching a lesson, of 
helping a neighbor, of speeding the world's work, 
of advancing the world's weal, of relieving a want, 
of imparting a joy. The call to labor is every fac- 
ulty we possess, every gift received, every privilege 
conferred, every opportunity offered. The call to 
labor is the fact of life. The hours of work are 
morning and evening, noon and night. The season 
of ingathering is summer and winter, spring and 
autumn. The harvest is human progress, the sum 
of earthly well being from age to age. 



V. 

THE PURE IN HEART SHALL SEE GOD. 

Blessed are the pure in heart : for they shall see God, 
Matt. v. 8. 

TT is always a figurative use of speech when we 
talk of seeing God. As the Jews understood 
the figure, it meant to behold the face of a sover- 
eign, to bask in the light of his countenance, 
to be blessed with his peculiar favor. As we 
understand it, to see God is to apprehend him, 
to be conscious of his presence, to enjoy his 
idea. The beatitude, as we understand it, is not 
a benediction radiated from the face of a sov- 
ereign, but the growth of the spirit into a fuller 
sense of the divine, — a freer, nearer commun- 
ion with God. In other words, the blessedness 
assured to the pure in heart is not a passive 
reception of divine favor, but a vivid conscious- 
ness of Godhead. 

The pure in heart shall see God ! Our percep- 
tion of Deity is commensurate with our moral 
development. As we are ourselves, so is the God 



THE PURE IN HEART SHALL SEE GOD. 69 

we apprehend. As we change ourselves, so God 
changes to our apprehension. With every change 
that comes over our character we shift our point 
of view. We know how differently sensible objects 
appear as the point of view varies from which 
they are beheld. The mountain is one thing seen 
in the far distance robed in the azure hue flung 
over it by atmospheric illusion, and another to the 
wanderer who climbs its shaggy sides. The even- 
ing star is one thing to the naked eye, and a dif- 
ferent thing when viewed through the telescope ; 
how different still, we may suppose, to the dweller 
whose being is cast on that radiant orb ! So the 
invisible objects of the mind, the everlasting ideas 
of the mind, vary with the character and culture 
of the mind that views them. The idea of God is 
held with what different modifications by different 
ages and minds ! It has never been wholly want- 
ing to the race. The lowest stage of humanity 
betrays some glimmering of this celestial light, 
though broken into strange refractions by the 
mists of ignorance. The highest culture can 
never outgrow its illumination. The progress 
of Humanity may be traced and measured by 
the character which this idea has assumed in 
different periods, nations, and faiths. The first 
gods were the misgrowths of Superstition. 



70 THE PURE IN HEART SHALL SEE GOD. 

" She taught the weak to bend, the proud to pray- 
To Power unseen and mightier far than they. 
She from the rending earth and bursting skies 
Saw gods descend and fiends infernal rise ; 
Here fixed the dreadful, there the blest abodes : 
Fear made her devils, and weak Hope her gods." 

The conceptions which men formed of Deity 
when the gods of Greece were the highest models 
of divine greatness and the supreme objects of 
religious homage, attest the low condition of moral 
culture from which they sprung. For the votary 
can hardly be supposed to be better than the god 
of his devotion ; and just in proportion as men 
advance in moral refinement they rise to higher 
conceptions of godhead, — from the gods of the 
Pantheon to the Jehovah of Judaism, from the 
Jehovah of Judaism to the Father in heaven of 
the Gospel and those sublime conceptions, u God 
is Light," and " God is Love." 

What is true of nations, periods, and religions is 
true of individuals. We repeat the course of social 
development in our individual experience. The 
purer we are ourselves, the greater our moral re- 
finement, the better the God of our conception, 
the freer from every taint of mortal imperfection. 
It may be objected that our idea of God is tradi- 
tional ; it is not our own conception, the growth of 
our own minds, but something which is given us 
in the doctrines of our religion. But that idea, 



THE PURE IN HEART SHALL SEE GOD. 71 

though given, cannot be our idea until we make 
it ours by personal experience. Our religion may 
teach that God is Love ; but we shall not so appre- 
hend him until in our moral development we have 
reached that stage of refinement, and consequently 
that point of view, from which God can be recog- 
nized as Love by us. If we consult the history of 
our religion, we shall find that the Christian idea 
of God as given in the New Testament, has not 
been the prevailing idea of the Christian world. 
Scarce a trace of this idea is apparent in any prom- 
inent actor in the long line of the Christian ages. 
There stand the immortal words " God is Love." 
When has this idea been practically acknowledged 
and embraced? In what church symbol or con- 
fession has it been set forth ? What creed, from 
the Athanasian to the Westminster Catechism, 
contains it? By what Christian Council, from that 
of Nicsea to that of Trent or the Vatican, was it 
ever enjoined? Was God believed to be Love 
when the heretics of Piedmont were hunted like 
wild beasts for endeavoring to restore the pristine 
faith of the Gospel ? Was God conceived to be 
Love when Huss and Jerome of Prague were burned 
at Constance ? Was it this idea that kindled the 
fires of Geneva and of Smithfield ? Was it the 
perception that God is Love that prompted the 
slaughter of the Huguenots and the tortures of 



72 THE PURE IN HEART SHALL SEE GOD. 

the Inquisition ? The idea is given, it is incul- 
cated by apostolic authority ; but men are inca- 
pable of receiving it until they reach the moral 
elevation from which it flowed. 

If we consult our own experience we shall find 
that our idea of God is variable, — that we ap- 
prehend him differently according to our mental 
states ; that though theoretically we receive the 
highest idea of God, our apprehension of that idea 
is not equally clear at all times ; that our appre- 
ciation of it depends on our moral condition. If 
at any time we have consciously transgressed the 
law of God, and the sense of that transgression 
weighs heavily on our souls, then we think of God 
as avenging Justice. If we have put our transgres- 
sion from us and are clear of that stain, God seems 
to us the loving Father once more. The more we 
seek to conform ourselves to his will and to per- 
fect his image in our lives, the more clearly we 
apprehend the saying, " God is Love." 

It is a matter of comparatively little importance 
what metaphysical conceptions we form to our- 
selves of the Godhead, — whether we conceive of 
him as a triune existence or as simple unity ; but 
it is of vast importance what ideas we entertain 
of his moral character, — whether righteousness or 
vengeance, mercy or wrath, predominate in our 
conception, — whether we apprehend God as Force 



THE PURE IN HEART SHALL SEE GOD. 73 

or as Love. And again, it matters little what our 
theory is about God, our speculative belief ; but 
it matters infinitely what our feeling is, and the 
practical persuasion of the heart. Men are some- 
times better than their theories, and sometimes 
worse. There are those who profess a stern the- 
ology, — a God inexorable, unrelenting, breathing 
vengeance, and inflicting endless pains, — who nev- 
ertheless, in their own character and commerce 
with their kind, are mild and merciful, full of 
love, always ready to forgive injuries, never will- 
ing to avenge. Mothers I have known who would 
bear forever with a froward child, infinitely pa- 
tient with real sin, while professing a God who 
punishes infinitely imputed sin, and who were alto- 
gether so much better than their creed that one 
knew not which more to admire, — the power of 
tradition in perverting the natural judgment, or the 
power of a beautiful nature to resist the petrifying 
influence of such a doctrine. What shall we say 
of such cases, in which there would seem to be no 
correspondence between the idea of God in the 
mind and the moral life in the heart ? I say, 
the God professed in such cases is not the God 
believed ; that far down beneath the crust of 
theology and beneath the rubbish of tradition 
there lives and works in that soul an idea of 
God which is worthy and true, which nourishes 



74 THE PURE IN HEART SHALL SEE GOD. 

it, and makes its practical religion better than 
its nominal. Here, too, the pure heart sees God 
— the true God, the God of the Gospel, the 
God of Love — under all the disguises of a false 
theology. 

On the other hand, there are those who profess 
belief in a loving, paternal God — a God of infinite 
compassion, a God who pities as a father his chil- 
dren — who have such an impression of God's 
mercy that they will hear of no retribution or 
penalty for sin, but who themselves are charac- 
terized by traits the very opposite of those they 
profess to adore, — harsh, impatient, tyrannical, 
vindictive, indifferent to others' good, with more 
of hatred than of love in their composition, — and 
who, if they possessed the power, would exercise 
a government the reverse of that which they as- 
cribe to Deity, would persecute their enemies with 
unappeasable hatred, and crush all who refused 
obedience to their arbitrary will. In this case, I 
say again, the God professed is not the God who 
is really present to the heart. Such characters 
can never see such a God; they can never truly 
believe him. 

" Blessed are the pure in heart : for they shall see 
God." We have found this saying true so far as 
the right apprehension of God is concerned. But 
not only is our power of appreciating the divine 



THE PURE IN HEART SHALL SEE GOD. 75 

attributes proportioned to our moral development ; 
our consciousness of God, the feeling of his all- 
presence, is subject to the same condition. The 
greater our moral refinement, the more God dwells 
in us and we in God. In one sense, indeed, the 
Divine Presence does not depend upon us or on 
anything out of itself. We conceive of God as 
present to every point of space and to every state 
of mind. But we must also conceive that the 
presence of God is one thing as it respects his own 
consciousness, and a different thing as it respects 
ours. There is a limit to the omnipresence of 
God. The individual consciousness, — that is a 
charmed circle into which even God does not enter, 
except so far as the individual is made receptive 
of God by moral and spiritual development. We 
know with what different degrees of proximity 
finite beings approach us, independently of all lo- 
cal relations. When is a human being near to 
us ? When we think of him, when we dwell on 
his idea. The friend whom I love is present to 
me at the distance of the earth's diameter. The 
individual who converses with me is not present 
if my heart and thoughts do not accompany his 
discourse. God is present to us only when we are 
conscious of him, when we converse with his idea ; 
and though he never for an instant withdraws 
from any one of us, he is infinitely removed from 



76 THE PURE IN HEART SHALL SEE GOD. 

those whose consciousness excludes him, who never 
draw near to him with mind or heart. In propor- 
tion as our moral nature is unfolded we draw near 
to God by moral gravitation ; we see him. There 
is nothing between us and God but our own im- 
perfections, our selfishness, our impiety and sin. 
It needs but a heart purified from worldliness and 
self, from mean and degrading associations, to see 
God as truly, though not in the same way, as we 
see the objects about us. For then everything 
which we see will be full of God. His presence 
will be seen to inform all Nature. It will smile 
upon us from every form of being, and pass before 
us in every aspect of life. Then we shall see all 
beauty to be his beauty, all power his will, all 
intelligence his inspiration, all creatures his ideas, 
all Nature his organ, all spirit his life. Why is it 
that popular superstition in time past removed 
•God from the earth and enthroned him above the 
skies ? Why should it ever have occurred to man 
that any other region was a fitter residence for 
Almighty Power than his own planet ? Because 
man was impure and could not see God in his own 
sphere, but conceived him infinitely removed, and 
thought he should honor him the more, the more 
he increased the distance between God and him- 
self. The popular theology still conceives of God 
as afar off, though it speaks of his omnipresence. 



THE PURE IN HEART SHALL SEE GOD. 77 

He is thought to be more present to some other 
sphere than to this. Hereafter, it is supposed, we 
shall be translated to that sphere, and then first we 
shall see God. Would that men might learn once 
for all that there is no change of sphere for man 
except by change of mind and heart! If you 
should die to-day, your sphere would be the same 
for all that. But change your mind, your heart, 
and the world is changed. Only a new heart can 
ever transport us to a new sphere, and only a pure 
heart can ever transport us into the presence of 
God. " We sometimes complain," says Martineau, 
" of the conditions of our being as unfavorable to 
the discernment and the love of God. We speak 
of him as veiled from us by our senses, and of the 
world as the outer region of exile from which he 
is peculiarly hid. In imagining what is holy and 
divine we take our flight into other worlds, and 
conceive that there the film must fall away and all 
adorable realities burst on our sight. Alas ! what 
reason have we to think any other station in the 
universe more sanctifying than our own ? . . . 
The dimness we deplore no travelling will cure ; 
the most perfect of observatories will not serve 
the blind. We carry our darkness with us, and 
instead of wandering to fresh scenes, and blaming 
our planetary atmosphere, and flying over creation 
for a purer air, it behoves us to sit by our own 



78 THE PURE IN HEART SHALL SEE GOD. 

wayside, and cry, ' Lord, that I may receive my 
sight!'" 

The difficulty of seeing God lies not in him, 
but in us. His invisibility is an attribute of 
our nature, not of his. We can only see as we 
are. It is only our impurities that separate us 
from him. As fast as these are removed, the 
Divine nature will open upon us, will fill up our 
whole field of vision, and convert all things into 
itself. The pure in heart not only see God, but 
they see nothing else. Everything they behold is 
charged with his idea; every appearance reveals 
his essence; every event accomplishes his provi- 
dence. They behold all things in God, and God 
in all things. Blessed are they ! Blessed in this 
beatific vision, this angelic theory, far beyond the 
blessedness which the Jewish mind connected with 
seeing God ; blessed in the fulness of spiritual life ; 
blessed in the consciousness of an immortal destiny. 
Who of human kind has been most blessed in our 
apprehension ? Of all who ever trod this earth, 
the most blessed was he who first uttered this beat- 
itude. And yet what a lot was his ! Not happy 
surely, in the vulgar sense of that term; not happy, 
judged by earthly standards of felicity ; yet su- 
premely blessed, seeing God face to face. He 
saw him not only in the aspects of nature, in 
the lilies of the field, in the fowls of the air, in 



THE PURE IN HEART SHALL SEE GOD. 79 

the innocence of little children, and the course 
of events, but he saw God in himself; he saw 
himself in God. He saw that there was noth- 
ing between God and him ; that he and the Father 
were one. 

May we ever look to enjoy a vision and a blessed- 
ness like this ? May we ever look to see God as 
Jesus saw him ? May we hope to be conscious of 
Deity as he was conscious ? Will the time ever 
come when we too can say, without blasphemy, I 
and the Father are one ? Are we sufficiently pure 
in heart even to desire this consummation ? Does 
it seem to us the most desirable that can be ? If 
not, let us ask ourselves what is desirable ? What 
would we have if unbounded power were given us 
to have and to be what we would ? Paint to your- 
self a destiny that would quite satisfy your crav- 
ing. Imagine a condition that would content you 
wholly and forever. If you follow your imagina- 
tion to its end, you will see at last that there is no 
destination that can satisfy all your desires, no 
condition that would content you wholly and for- 
ever, except it be one that is bringing you nearer 
to God and giving you a more adequate vision and 
a more intense enjoyment of his idea. 

Nearness to God or estrangement from him will 
be found at last to be the gauge and criterion of 
blessedness and misery for moral natures. The 



80 THE PURE IN HEART SHALL SEE GOD. 

purity of heart, the perfect unfolding of the moral 
life which shall make us see God, which shall 
make us one with him, — all reasoning and all 
experience point to this as the supreme good for 
man ; and to alienation from him as the crowning 
evil. 



VI. 

THE SOUL'S DELIVERANCE. 

Bring my soul out of prison, that I may praise thy 
name. Psalm cxlii. 7. 

HPHIS Psalm was supposed by some Hebrew 
■*■ commentators to have been composed in the 
cave of Adullam, in which the author secreted him- 
self from the machinations of Saul. That cavern 
experience being the nearest approach to literal 
imprisonment to be found in the history of David, it 
was foolishly concluded that the cave of Adullam 
must have been the prison he meant. Surely, there 
were many passages in the life of David, and many 
experiences of David's heart, which might be so 
designated with more propriety than that tempo- 
rary retreat. To him, I suppose, as to other noble 
and endowed natures, and indeed to most mortals, 
there were moments when life itself seemed a 
prison, — when the soul confined in its own con- 
sciousness tasted all the bitterness of bondage 
without its forms. 

6 



82 THE SOUL'S DELIVERANCE. 

There are many experiences which take this 
character and produce this effect. There are pas- 
sages in every life which involve this captivity. 
Who of us all is so fortunate as not to have 
tasted at times of the bondage of bodily or men- 
tal suffering ? Is there one who has not been the 
prisoner of disease, of headache or heartache, or the 
prisoner of doubts and fears, ■ — the prisoner of do- 
mestic calamity and disappointed hopes, — a pris- 
oner to hours of sharp distress, — "a prisoner long 

In gloom and loneliness of mind, 
Deaf to the melody of song, 
To every form of beauty blind." 

But waiving these special instances, there is one 
universal experience which claims to be noticed in 
this connection, — one species of confinement com- 
mon to all who rise above the level of a merely ani- 
mal life. I mean the conflict we all experience 
between the ideal and the actual, between desire 
and fruition, our conceptions and our attainments, 
our designs and our acts. We all have our ideal, 
our dream of prosperity, perhaps of desert, our vis- 
ion of a blessed life, — at least occasional convic- 
tions of the inadequacy of our present being and 
doing, and aspirations after something better. 
Could we only reproduce this ideal, could we only 
realize these aspirations in the life ! But who does 
this ? What hero or saint ever makes his actual 



THE SOUL'S DELIVERANCE. 83 

life correspond with his ideal, his practice equal to 
his vision ? There is this discrepance, this contra- 
diction, between the two parts of our nature and 
between the two realms of our life, — the ideal and 
the actual, the theoretic and the practical. Our 
seeing is always in advance of our being. It is so 
in the sphere of physical experience as well as of 
the mind. A glance of the eye shows us objects a 
hundred millions of miles removed; but a radius 
of a very few feet bounds the uttermost reach of the 
hand, and the earth's diameter at farthest bounds 
the uttermost range of locomotion. What wonder 
if with our mental vision also we see farther than 
we can reach, and see better than we are ! What 
wonder if glorious possibilities dance before our 
eyes, while sordid realities trail by our side, — if 
our theory sees the heavens open, while our practice 
crawls in the dust! 

This, then, is the prison to which I especially in- 
vite your attention. This is a prison in which we 
all have been confined, — the feeling of incapacity, 
the insufficiency of life, the conflict between the 
ideal and the actual ; on the one hand a dissonance 
between our desire and our destiny, and on the 
other hand a discrepance between our theory and 
our practice. Life disappoints our wishes in what 
it brings, and it disappoints our purpose in what ifc 
accomplishes. 



84 THE SOUL'S DELIVERANCE. 

1. Our destiny does not correspond with our 
desire. Our kingdom of heaven is always com- 
ing and never comes. Imagination dreams of 
blessedness which reality never knows, and we 
soon learn that life has nothing so fine as its 
dreams. The difficulty is not that this or that 
particular prize to which we aspired has not been 
attained, that this or that possession which the 
heart coveted has proved impracticable. It may 
be that all we wished has been accomplished. In 
most cases I believe it is accomplished, and often 
more than we wished. The projects which we 
planned have been achieved ; the prizes we pursued 
have been won. Success in that sense is all but 
sure to vigorous effort and patient toil. What 
youth craved, old age has its fill of. But that 
which should accompany success — satisfaction, 
peace — comes not. Instead thereof, care, vexa- 
tion, weariness of spirit. Riches, fame, love, prove 
other in possession than they were in prospect and 
desire. The fruit that looked so tempting on the 
tree is insipid to the taste. The mountain top 
which drew the longing eyes from afar, and which 
cost so much pain and toil in the ascent, when 
reached at last is found to be barren rock or eter- 
nal snow. If it lifts above the rest of the world, 
it isolates and chills in proportion as it raises. 
They who gather most can enjoy no more than be- 



THE SOUL'S DELIVERANCE. 85 

longs to one, and they who possess most are most 
apt to be as though they possessed not. The most 
successful are often those who feel most deeply the 
burden of the great tragedy, the insufficiency of 
life, the distance which separates our destiny and 
our desire. " As a worm," says Taylor, " creeps 
upon the ground with her share and portion of 
Adam's curse, and lifts up her head to partake a lit- 
tle of the blessings of the air and opens the junctures 
of her imperfect body, but still must return to abide 
the fate of her own nature, and dwell and sleep in 
the dust ; so are the hopes of mortal man. He 
opens his eyes and looks upon fine things at a dis- 
tance, and shuts them again with weakness because 
they are too glorious to behold. And the man re- 
joices because he hopes fine things are staying for 
him, but his heart aches because he knows there 
are a thousand ways to miss of these glories ; and 
though he hopes yet he enjoys not, he longs but he 
possesses not, and must be content with his portion 
of the dust." Thus life imprisons us by its limita- 
tions, by its inadequacy to our desire. It becomes 
a prison to the soul whenever and in proportion as 
that inadequacy is felt. 

2. Life disappoints our purposes in what it ac- 
complishes or in what we accomplish by it. The 
same distance intervenes between our conception 
and our attainment as between our destiny and 



86 THE SOUL'S DELIVERANCE. 

our desire. We conceive in our meditations an 
idea of excellence which is never realized ; we ima- 
gine a perfection in our works and pursuits which 
is never attained ; we propose to ourselves models 
of character and life which our practice belies. 
" See that thou make all things according to the 
pattern showed to thee in the mount ! " The earnest 
soul is forever haunted by a vision of what might 
be and should be. " The pattern in the mount ! " 
Could we only abide in that mount of vision ! 
Could we only abide in our conceptions, and not 
be compelled to bring them to the test of action, 
what heroes and saints we should be ! When the 
vision is on us we feel it is good for us to be there, 
and like the giddy disciple on the Mount of Trans- 
figuration, would fain build our tabernacle to fix 
and perpetuate the ideal glories which pass before 
the mind. But destiny forbids. The world claims 
us ; we must quit the mountain and come down to 
real life. That coming down from the mountain, 
how hard it is ! How abrupt and trying the de- 
scent from theory to practice, and how soon the 
first contact with the world explodes our dream, 
and melts our heroism into thin air! There, on the 
mount, the most arduous seemed practicable ; here, 
on the level of every-day life, the most trivial is a 
burden. There our virtue was impregnable ; here 
the first temptation causes us to offend. There we 



THE SOUL'S DELIVERANCE. 87 

were ready to be offered for duty's sake ; here a pin- 
prick provokes our impatience. We propose to 
ourselves some work to be accomplished by our in- 
dustry, some worthy achievement which shall be a 
witness of our quality and a blessing to the world. 
It stands so complete in our conception, — the exe- 
cution will be but sport, a brief and easy labor of 
love. We lay hand on our task, and soon find that 
our conception has outrun our faculty. We faint 
beneath the burden we have taken upon ourselves ; 
the sweat of our brow and the strength of our 
hearts are scarce sufficient for the work. In labor 
and sorrow we bring forth at last. We accom- 
plish something, — the work is done ; but how faint 
and poor compared with the archetype we saw in 
our vision ! Our weary days are in it, but our 
ideal is not there. Our noblest products, how wide 
of the pattern showed us in the mount ! Thus life 
disappoints our intent and baffles our endeavor, 
and thus it becomes a prison to the eager soul in 
the conscious limitation of our powers. What 
bondage more galling to quick and aspiring minds 
than this sense of limitation, of inadequacy, the 
disproportion between our conceptions and our 
powers, — this contradiction of boundless desires 
and small satisfactions, heroic purposes and feeble 
works, — this everlasting conflict between theory 
and practice, between the ideal and the actual, 



88 THE SOUL'S DELIVERANCE. 

between the visions of the mind and the realities 
of life ! 

Whether it was this which extorted from David 
the prayer, " Bring my soul out of prison," I know 
not ; but seeing that David was a man of like na- 
ture with ourselves, it may be presumed that he 
too shared the universal burden, and that this sup- 
plication of his expressed the same feeling of the 
insufficiency of life which oppresses all sensitive 
and reflective minds. It is this that has prompted 
similar expressions from men of note in every age. 
It was this that wrung from the patriarch Jacob 
the sad confession, " Few and evil have been the 
years of my life." It was this that dictated the 
words ascribed to Moses : " Thou carriest them 
away as with a flood ; they are as a sleep. All 
our days are passed away in thy wrath : we spend 
our years as a tale that is told. The days of our 
years are threescore years and ten ; and if by 
reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is 
their strength labor and sorrow ; for it is soon 
cut off, and we fly away." It was this that spoke 
through the lips of Job : " Man that is born of a 
woman is of few days, and full of trouble. He 
cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down : he 
fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not." It 
was this that inspired the sullen music of Eccle- 
siastes : " Vanity of vanities ; all is vanity. What 



THE SOUL'S DELIVERANCE. 89 

profit hath a man of all his labor?" It was this 
that made Christian Paul say, on the very thresh- 
old, as he supposed, of the heavenly kingdom: "The 
whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain to- 
gether until now. And not only they, but ourselves 
also, which have the first-fruits of the Spirit, even 
we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for 
the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body." 
And again more emphatically, " To will is present 
with me ; but how to perform that which is good, I 
find not. For the good that I would, I do not: 
but the evil which I would not, that I do. ... 
wretched man that I am ! who shall deliver me 
from the body of this death ? " 

The time would fail if I were to cite the secular 
testimonies which bear on this point, — if I were to 
attempt to bring before you the poets, the heroes, 
and the sages who in one form or another, in the 
way of confession or supplication, have echoed the 
prayer of David, u Bring my soul out of prison." 
" Help' my insufficiency, take away the burden of 
infirmity, redeem my life, make it equal to my in- 
tent and desire." Humanity with one heart con- 
fesses the experience implied in this petition. 
Humanity with one voice says, Amen! to this 
prayer. 

I cannot say whether or no the prayer has been 
fully and satisfactorily answered to any in the flesh. 



90 THE SOUL'S DELIVERANCE. 

But this I say, that divine Providence working in 
human history has not left us without guidance 
and without hope in this radical and universal 
need. The answer has been suggested at least, if 
not realized. The way of escape from this prison 
of our infirmity has been indicated in one recorded 
life, in which the conflict between the ideal and the 
actual has been done away ; the life of " that man 
whom he hath ordained," the divine man, whom 
with some dim sense of this service his adoring 
disciples have named their Redeemer and their 
God. And this to me is the great significance of 
the life of Jesus. I see in it the reconciliation of 
the ideal and the real. This is the true historical 
atonement in Christ. This is the meaning which 
lies in the ancient dogma of the Church, — the 
dogma of the Incarnation, the Word made flesh, 
God manifest in man. Jesus expressed, as no 
other has done, his conception in his life ; he real- 
ized his idea and turned it into fact, and made it a 
part of the history of man. 

The greatest of Christian painters, the immortal 
Raphael, has figured this marriage of the real and 
the ideal in the life of Jesus, in his painting of the 
Transfiguration. The upper half of the canvas 
represents the transfigured Christ, the Lord of 
glory, with Moses and Elias by his side ; the lower 
exhibits the melancholy scene which immediately 



THE SOUL'S DELIVERANCE. 91 

followed, — that sad passage of real life into which 
the Master entered immediately on his descent 
from the mountain, — the dumb and lunatic child 
with his helpless and sorrowing parents and friends, 
who have come to implore the Rabbi in his behalf. 
Superficial critics have blamed the artist for bring- 
ing these two scenes, so different in character and 
scope, into one view. They would rather that each 
should be depicted on a separate canvas. But the 
instinct of the artist has proved in this instance a 
better guide than the judgment of the critic to the 
true unfolding of the Gospel story. So near to- 
gether are vision and action, theory and practice, 
the glory and the task, the ideal and the real, the 
God and the man, in the life of Jesus ! He could 
pass at once from the vision to the deed, and be 
equally true and equally great in the one as in the 
other. He knew how to come down from the 
mountain with undiminished power and glory ; he, 
after converse with the eternal and beatific dreams, 
could enter at once on the scenes of active life, and 
accept the first and humblest occasion that offered, 
without leaving the better part of his being behind 
him. He has solved in his life the old contradic- 
tion, and done away the discrepance between here 
and there, between the spiritual world and the 
actual, " he hath broken down the middle wall of 
partition, ... to make in himself of twain one 



92 THE SOWS DELIVERANCE. 

new man," presenting thus the example of an ab- 
solute man, where there is neither flesh nor spirit, 
but where flesh is sublimed into spirit, and spirit 
is realized in flesh. 

And if it be asked how this was effected, — by 
what hidden path, by what mystic discipline, the 
divine man perfected his humanity and entered 
into glory and into Godhead, — putting out of 
view the providential side of that wondrous life, and 
looking only at the human, we may take for answer 
the solution given in the Scripture : " Who, being 
in the form of God," that is, made, as man, in the 
image of God, " thought it not robbery to be equal 
with God," or, more correctly rendered, " thought 
not by robbery to equal God," that is, did not at- 
tempt divinity by ambitious striving beyond his 
appointed sphere, " but made himself of no reputa- 
tion, and took upon him the form of a servant, 
and was made in the likeness of men : " that is, 
lived and labored like other men, " and being 
found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and 
became obedient unto death, even the death of the 
cross." That was the way by which Jesus rose; 
that was his discipline and method, and his deifica- 
tion. " Wherefore," the writer continues, " God also 
hath highly exalted him, and given him a name 
which is above every name : that at the name of 
Jesus every knee should bow . . . and every tongue 



THE SOUVS DELIVERANCE. 93 

should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the 
glory of God the Father." In other words, Jesus 
accepted the conditions of his lot, externally one of 
the humblest, and exalted himself and it, and made 
his life divine by perfect obedience to those condi- 
tions. He did not aspire to the place of command 
to which his people gladly would have exalted him, 
but abode in his native humility and walked with 
his peasant companions, and found the topics of 
his duty among the halt and blind and publicans 
and sinners, and preached his gospel to the poor. 
He did not seek to transcend his sphere externally 
by self-aggrandizement, but was satisfied to fill it 
completely, casting into it all the fulness of his 
royal nature. Thus he brought his soul out of 
prison, — the prison of low and bounded reality, — 
by ignoring its bounds, living wholly in the eter- 
nal. Making the will of God his first, sole object, 
his meat and his drink, he laid hold on eternal life ; 
and thus by one shining example of self-emancipa- 
tion, by one perfect instance of a liberated life, he 
preaches still to spirits in prison the world over, to 
whom the gospel of that life has come. Let all 
who pine in conscious captivity of mind and heart, 
all who feel themselves immured in stony negations, 
and beat with impotent longing against the walls of 
their lot, let them take to heart the lesson of that 
life. The walls will dissolve and disappear as fast 



94 THE SOUL'S DELIVERANCE. 

as the truth which it teaches breaks in upon their 
night. Do we sigh with the Psalmist, " Bring my 
soul out of prison," let us know that humble and 
perfect obedience is the key which unlocks the 
prison of the soul, and leads it forth from the 
stifling atmosphere of its discontent into broad and 
liberal day. Accept the actual in which you are 
placed. Put away selfish and sickly ambition, and 
find yourself in your appointed conditions. Adjust 
yourself with the terms of your lot. Instead of 
seeking to lift yourself above it by uneasy efforts, 
seek rather to fill it out by throwing into it the ful- 
ness of your faculty and your life. It is the error 
of indolent natures to think that happiness and 
virtue and opportunities of well-doing belong to 
certain conditions ; that they could be useful and 
blessed, if anywhere else than where they happen 
to be, — if the climate were different, or the time, 
or place, or company. Be equal, first, to your own 
sphere. Do full justice to that ; satisfy perfectly 
the present occasion, fulfil to the uttermost each 
successive task and demand of the place and the 
hour. It is only by being faithful in that which 
is least that we prove ourselves equal to higher 
trusts. 

Cuvier, the celebrated naturalist, whenever his 
pupils came to him with some new anatomical 
theory, would bid them test it by dissecting the first 



THE SOUL'S DELIVERANCE. 95 

insect that came in their way. If your theory of 
well doing will not apply to your present sphere, if 
it will not apply to the humblest instance, you may 
be sure it will not hold in relation to any other. 
Here we are ; that is our first concern. Let us see 
that we be truly and wholly and beneficently here, 
with all our faculty and heart. It may seem 
brighter elsewhere, but that is an optical illusion ; 
here, too, it is good to be. God is here, and man is 
here, and the calls and topics of daily duty. And 
duty is everywhere the same thing, everywhere suffi- 
cient and divine. " Give me where to stand," said 
the Greek. Stand where you are, is the nobler pos- 
tulate ; stand where you are, and move the world. 
Heaven's zenith is perpendicular to every spot on 
the earth's round. This is the lesson which comes 
to us from the life of Christ, who united the truest 
vision, the noblest service, and the highest glory 
with the lowest lot. The only way to bring our 
soul out of prison is to find ourselves in that which 
we call and make a prison by our misdirected long- 
ing, to throw ourselves into it with all our heart 
and all our strength, to fill the God-given mould 
with the fulness of our life. This no one entirely 
succeeds in doing; but every approach to it is 
progress in the right direction. With every step in 
that path our redemption draweth nigh. Just so far 
as we attain in this direction, our prison enlarges 



96 THE SOUL'S DELIVERANCE. 

and disappears. The Kingdom of Heaven is here 
or nowhere. Duty is the key that unlocks it to all. 
Only so far as we succeed in making the will of 
God our meat and our drink, can we ever lay hold 
on everlasting life. 



VII. 

RESERVED POWER. 

He that is faithful in thai which is least, is faithful 
also in much. Luke xvi. 10. 

T TUMAN life is made up in large measure of 
humble tasks and petty offices, which, how- 
ever indispensable in their places, are strangely 
disproportioned to the powers and capacities of 
those who perform them, and which seem out of 
keeping with the dignity of man, considered as a 
child of God and an heir of immortality. There 
is no man so humble in ability or station that he 
is not greater than the work he is called to per- 
form ; and most earthly work seems trivial when 
compared with the higher calling of the human 
soul. For the soul in this present is often a Sam- 
son in bonds, captive to coarse Philistine taskmas- 
ters, shorn of his strength, bereft of eyesight, set to 
grind for daily bread. Of the greatest and wisest 
of human kind, how many have toiled in lowly 
places and mechanical tasks ! Carpenters, tent- 
makers, shoemakers, lens-grinders have been the 
lights of the world. 



98 RESERVED POWER. 

We think the smaller the function the smaller 
the capacity required for its performance ; and 
when we consider the kinds of labor which make 
the world's work, how much drudgery and me- 
chanical routine, what servile and pitiful tasks 
compose the sum of human affairs, we are tempted 
to say that man is too great for his work ; that a 
race of creatures less splendidly furnished, less 
finely organized, less curiously and variously en- 
dowed, — something between brute and man, — 
would be quite adequate and better fitted for such 
employment. What need of immortal powers, of 
beings made in the image of God, to carry on the 
buying and selling, the chaffering and tinkering, 
the nameless, tasteless taskwork of daily life ? 

To this view of life, very natural but very super- 
ficial, a truer wisdom opposes the maxim, " lie 
that is faithful in that which is least is faithful 
also in much;" he shows himself equal to higher 
spheres and nobler tasks. In other words, it mat- 
ters not what the work is which is given us to do. 
All work requires faculty and fidelity and consci- 
entious care for its best performance. All work 
tries and tests these qualities, and educates them. 
And moreover the qualities required and proved 
by faithful performance of that which is least, are 
the same with those which qualify us for success 
in that which is greatest. This is the Christian 



RESERVED POWER, 99 

doctrine concerning work, — a doctrine abundantly 
and signally illustrated in the life of Jesus. He 
who by virtue of his transcendent endowments 
might have claimed exemption from the com- 
mon lot, was conversant from first to last with 
ordinary scenes and things. His ministry, if we 
consider the sphere in which it was exercised, its 
topics and occasions, was one continued act of 
self-humiliation. His extraordinary gifts were ap- 
plied to ends very different from those which 
might have been expected to furnish the topics 
and occasion of so divine a mission. They pro- 
duced no splendid achievements such as a worldly 
ambition might propose to itself. They were exer- 
cised in lowly offices of love which had no aim 
beyond the immediate comfort they afforded to 
some private circle or some individual sufferer. 
The objects of those charities, we all know, were 
not the noble and the rich, but the obscure and de- 
spised, the little ones of earth, the poor villager, the 
contemned foreigner, the cripple by the wayside, 
the paralytic at the well. Such was the sphere 
in which Jesus wrought, and such the offices of 
which his ministry was composed. A true son, 
in this as in all things, of the heavenly Father, 
who also worketh in secret and obscurity, and in 
places and things that are counted vile ; as active 
in the processes of corruption as in the sublimest 



100 RESERVED POWER. 

growths of time ; bestowing the same care in ad- 
justing the articulations of a worm as in settling 
the balance of a world. Throughout the life of 
Jesus we behold this disproportion between the 
actor and his sphere. We might feel pained at 
the incongruity, — we might think that so kingly 
a nature should have had a more conspicuous 
arena than the villages of Galilee, and more wor- 
thy objects than the peasants who inhabited them, 
— did we not see that the true sphere of Jesus 
has proved to be the whole world of humanity in 
which his word and his example live and work to 
this day. 

It is a great mistake to suppose that the more 
insignificant the task the smaller the capacity 
required to perform it, and that those who are 
poorest in culture and endowments are best fitted 
to discharge satisfactorily the humbler offices of 
life. Alas for us if we are not greater than our 
work ! It can never be done as it should be done, 
unless we bring to it more wisdom, ability, and 
virtue than it seems to require, than we can man- 
age in most cases to put into it. Beside the 
specific degree of power and goodness which may 
seem to be requisite for a given sphere or work, 
there is needed a power and goodness which are 
not always or often expressed, which do not ap- 
pear to the superficial observer, but which serve 



RESERVED POWER. 101 

to give completeness and effect to daily tasks and 
the commonplace drudgery of life. 

In saying this, I but state a principle which 
pervades the whole economy of Nature. Whatever 
product of Nature we examine, we see at once that 
it could not be what it is were it not a great deal 
more than it seems to be, did there not lie behind 
it a hidden magazine of inexhaustible power and 
riches which only minute analysis can detect. A 
flower or leaf when decomposed exhibits a few sim- 
ple elements combined in certain definite propor- 
tions. A little carbon, a little oxygen and hydrogen, 
compose the whole glory of the vegetable creation. 
But the meanest flower that blows, the most insig- 
nificant leaf that springs in the depth of the forest, 
is predicated on infinite resources, and presupposes 
the whole immensity of Nature as the background 
of its fragile life. In the animal creation there 
slumber instincts which in ordinary cases never 
come into play. But let a sufficient exigency 
occur, and a new faculty starts up at the right 
moment to rescue the animal from impending de- 
struction. In the economy of the human frame 
there are -stored up forces which are not needed 
for the common occasions of life, and many a life 
passes without giving the least hint of their exist- 
ence. But let the system sustain an important 
lesion, as in the case of a broken limb, and watch- 



102 RESERVED POWER. 

ful Nature then takes up her hidden power, and 
calls into action the healing virtues of her invisible 
dispensary to knit the fractured parts ; and all 
that medical art can do is to follow reverently the 
first intention of the great Physician. 

And so human life, the voluntary life of toil and 
action to which as human beings we are called, 
not less than the involuntary life of the animal 
economy, must contain within itself, and would 
be miserably defective did it not contain, a reserved 
power wherewith to meet the unforeseen exigencies 
to which every sphere and almost every life is 
exposed. And apart from these exigencies, the 
daily tasks of life are ill performed, its ordinary 
duties ill provided for, unless there is more of 
faculty and virtue than they seem at first to re- 
quire. Experience will show that the greater the 
ideas with which we are conversant, and the wider 
our sphere of vision, and the more profound our 
views of life, and the richer our talent, and the 
more extensive our acquirements, the better pre- 
pared we are for the meanest offices, which cease 
to be mean when ennobled by such conditions. 
Drudgery is no longer drudgery when such powers 
and resources engage in it, when Faith and Love 
stoop down from their heavens to perform a ser- 
vant's work. Unless we have more than enough, 
we have not enough tor the claims that are on us. 



RESERVED POWER. 103 

In the matter of education you would think the 
teacher but poorly furnished for his function who 
should know no more than he was called to teach ; 
who should barely have gone over the ground 
which his pupils are to go over, whose acquire- 
ments should be but a few steps only in advance of 
their lessons. You would say that the teacher to 
be efficient and successful must know a great deal 
more than his pupils, a great deal more than he 
is required to teach. The uttermost of knowledge 
and ability ever possessed by man would not be 
superfluous. Though it might not be called into 
action in the way of direct instruction, it would all 
go to illustrate the subject taught. It would give 
to the mind of the teacher that compass and ele- 
vation, that perfect accuracy and fulness of detail, 
which acts like inspiration on the mind of the 
pupil. In some way or other the pupil would 
be enriched by all the stores of knowledge the 
instructor might bring to his task. It has been 
well said, that " the child's elementary instruction 
would be best conducted, if possible, by omnis- 
cience itself." You would think your representa- 
tive in the national council but poorly fitted for 
his post, who should know no more than the aver- 
age of his constituents. Other things being equal, 
you would choose for this purpose the best in- 
formed, the wisest and ablest that could be found. 



104 RESERVED POWER. 

You would have him possessed of stores of knowl- 
edge, and a wealth of funded power which in ordi- 
nary cases might not be elicited ; which session 
after session might pass without calling into ac- 
tion ; but by means of which he would be able, on 
the sudden, to meet any occasion that might occur, 
and to concentrate the study of many years on 
some constitutional or international question of 
difficult arbitrament and momentous issues. 

But not to insist on great emergencies, the 
ordinary duties of every calling require for their 
successful performance more ability and knowl- 
edge than appears outwardly in their respective 
products. The plea of an advocate at the bar, 
the prescription of a physician, nay, the material 
product of the artisan, imply a far greater range 
of knowledge, longer and more various studies, 
than they exhibit, than those who are served by 
them are apt to suspect. They could not be what 
they are, were there not a great deal more behind 
them than appears. It would be easy to show that 
in every department of life the amount of skill vis- 
ible to the vulgar eye, in the effect produced, is a 
very small part of that which is actually required 
to produce it. 

Apply this principle to those thousand nameless 
tasks which belong to no particular calling, but 
which nevertheless comprise so large a part of 



RESERVED POWER. 105 

every life, — offices which are held in such light 
estimation, and yet are so essential to human 
comfort and well-being. They require no great 
measure of technical skill ; they involve but little 
knowledge or art ; but they demand what is more 
than these, — they demand for their faithful dis- 
charge a moral discipline and a moral elevation ; a 
conscientiousness, I may say, a heavenly minded- 
ness with which they seem, at first glance, to have 
no connection, which it may even seem extravagant 
and absurd to name in connection with them. 
Jesus, I think, indicated this connection, when on 
one occasion he laid aside his garment and girded 
himself as a menial to wash the feet of those rude 
men, so incapable of understanding the exquisite 
refinement, the divine exaltation of his nature. 
He has taught us a lesson which we have learned 
but imperfectly, if we do not perceive its broad 
application to all the drudgery of life. He has 
taught us to call nothing unworthy or degrad- 
ing which the necessities of human nature and 
human life have imposed ; to think nothing vile 
but sin ; to disdain no office which life may re- 
quire at our hands ; to esteem nothing beneath 
our dignity which is necessary to be done, and 
which it is well to do. 

In Jesus we behold the highest degree of spirit- 
ual elevation linked with mean conditions, and 



106 RESERVED POWER. 

taking upon itself the form of a servant, — a heav- 
enly soul* in a lowly sphere; a strange contrast of 
humble offices and sublime ideas. In every son 
of man there must be an elevation of spirit above 
the ordinary level of life, to meet with dignity its 
ordinary demands and satisfactorily to fulfil its 
humblest duties. 

As in every work of art and in every profes- 
sional service there is more of skill and ability 
than appears on the surface, so in every good act, 
in every duty well performed, in every hard or irk- 
some and distasteful thing which is done for con- 
science' sake, there is more of goodness than 
appears, more than it is possible to compute. It 
is impossible to compute how much of moral dis- 
cipline and religious faith, how much of heroism 
and self-sacrifice may enter into the composition 
of a character, whose greatest visible achievement 
consists in simply bearing and forbearing as daily 
occasion demands. 

Life is poor and pitiful if we look only at its 
material results. So much toil and care to keep 
the house in order and the body whole. We often 
think with the sceptic in the play, " How stale, 
flat, and unprofitable are all the uses of this 
world!" We must look to its moral issues if we 
would know the true significance of life. We 
must think that these things are topics of duty 



RESERVED POWER. 107 

and means of discipline and growth, that they 
answer that purpose as well or better than if the 
All-wise had made us " rulers over many things," 
and set us to govern states or create worlds. 
We may indulge our fancy with a state of being 
and a sphere of action better adapted to the wants 
and capacities of a rational soul, where there shall 
be nothing common or mean, no drudgery, no irk- 
some and distasteful tasks, where all our labors 
shall be regal and stately, and every duty have a 
lofty and romantic cast. But a little reflection 
will convince us that this is all a delusion. Just 
so far as duty ceases to be irksome it ceases to 
be discipline. Like Christ, the Master, we must 
take upon ourselves the form of servants, if ever 
we would reign with him in glory. Let us not 
complain that the soul is too great for its dwelling, 
but make room as we can in the mortal tabernacle 
for the immortal guest, and think how much bet- 
ter it is that the soul should be greater than its 
sphere, than that the sphere should be too great 
for the soul ; and how poor we should be, if, in- 
stead of having more than enough for our daily 
tasks, we had not sufficient wherewith to perform 
them. 

Never fear that the heir of immortality will 
squander his inheritance among the trivialities and 
commonplaces of his low estate, that the soul will 



108 RESERVED POWER. 

belittle itself with its small tasks, until at last it 
becomes " subdued to what it works in." Not 
small tasks belittle, but small aims and petty views 
and fears. The Son of Man sacrifices nothing of 
his dignity, but only adds to it when he stoops to 
anoint the eyes of the beggar and to wash the dis- 
ciples' feet. And the soul should be as the Son 
of Man, — a regal nature in a mean environment, 
always greater than its office, yet never disdaining 
the meanest office that comes in its way, thinking 
no trifle of earthly details too small for its care, 
while it deems no prize of earthly greatness suffi- 
cient for its reward. " He that is faithful in that 
which is least, is faithful also in much ; and he that 
is unjust in the least, is unjust also in much." 



VIII. 

THE GOSPEL OF MANUAL LABOE. 

Is not this the carpenter's son ? . . . WJience then hath 
this man all these things ? Matt. xiii. 55, 56. 

'TPHE countrymen of Jesus did not by this ques- 
tion intend to disparage his hereditary calling, 
or to intimate an incompatibility between the car- 
penter and the prophet, but only to express their 
astonishment that this particular carpenter's son — 
their own fellow-townsman — should come to be 
a teacher of divine truth. The presumption was 
not against the craft, as if that were inconsistent 
with the widest knowledge and the highest wisdom, 
but against the fact that one who was born in their 
own midst, whom they knew all about, should arrive 
at such eminence in that capacity. " Is not his 
mother called Mary, and his brethren James and 
Joses and Simon and Judas ? And his sisters, are 
they not all with us ? Whence then hath this man 
all these things ? " It was just the old inveterate 
prejudice, not yet obsolete, against home-born 
genius and worth, — the prejudice which fancies 



110 THE GOSPEL OF MANUAL LABOR. 

that wisdom must needs be a foreign product, that 
all good and divine things must be imported, that 
by no possibility can recent and native growths 
compare with those which come to us from ancient 
time or distant lands. Against this prejudice it 
would seem that Jesus himself found it vain to 
contend. He said unto them, " A prophet is not 
without honor, save in his own country, and in 
his own house. And he did not many mighty 
works there, because of their unbelief." 

There was no presumption, I say, on the part of 
the countrymen of Jesus against the carpenter's 
craft or any other mechanical employment as in- 
compatible with the highest intellectual and spir- 
itual eminence. The Jews had none of those 
prejudices as to the comparative capability and 
respectability of different pursuits which prevail in 
modern society. The Jewish polity, theocratic as 
it was in its civil theory and constitution, was very 
democratic in its social principle. It had kings 
and priests by. divine right, but no aristocracy in 
our sense of the term, — no aristocracy founded on 
employment, but only an aristocracy of age. In 
fact, so great was the estimation in which the use- 
ful arts were held that, according to the Talmud, 
all parents were required to have their children 
instructed in some trade or craft which they might 
or might not practise in after years. " The high- 



THE GOSPEL OF MANUAL LABOR. HI 

est rank in the estimation of the people," says a 
recent authority, " was not reserved for the priests, 
but for the learned ; and many of the most emi- 
nent of these were tradesmen. They were tent- 
makers, weavers, sandal-makers, carpenters, tan- 
ners, bakers, cooks. A newly elected president of 
the senate was found by his predecessor, who had 
been ignominiously deposed for his overbearing 
manner, all grimy in the midst of his charcoal 
mounds. Of all things most hated were idle- 
ness and asceticism. Piety and learning them- 
selves received their proper estimation only when 
joined to bodily work. * Add a trade to your 
studies,' was one of their sayings, ' and you will be 
free from sin.' ' The tradesman at his work need 
not rise before the greatest Doctor.' l Greater is 
he who derives his livelihood from work than he 
who fears God.' " Wise doctrine and wise uses are 
these ; their adoption and practice by us would 
prove the best safeguard of our national pros- 
perity. The national prosperity suffers from the 
general aversion to manual labor, which turns 
the young men of the country away from agri- 
cultural and mechanical employments, and drives 
them in excess to those pursuits which add noth- 
ing to the real wealth of the nation, but which 
hold out the lure of city life, and tempt with the 
distant chance of a fortune to be obtained by adroit 



112 THE GOSPEL OF MANUAL LABOR. 

speculation rather than by patient and productive 
industry, The chance is distant, but by it a large 
portion of the brain and muscle of the nation is 
seduced from the paths and works that most sorely 
need it. Labor in the way of production is com- 
paratively scarce ; labor in mercantile life is redun- 
dant. Let the public prints advertise for a clerk 
in a counting-room, and straightway a hundred ap- 
plicants present themselves as candidates for the 
vacant office. Had these waiters on the chances of 
trade been instructed in some useful handicraft, 
they might have been profitably employed in need- 
ful service instead of suing for the crumbs which 
fall from the table of commercial prosperity. 

The disinclination to mechanical labor arises not 
from indolence alone, but is due in part to the false 
and pernicious conceit that somehow the business 
of selling is more respectable than that of produc- 
ing, the work of the counting-room than that of the 
mechanic ; and that sacrifice of gentility is involved 
in the use of the axe or the spade or the trowel or 
the plane. The origin of this fallacy dates from 
barbarous ages, when fighting was considered to be 
the real business of life, when the only respectable 
employment was thought to be that of the warrior, 
and the useful arts and all the necessary work of 
society was assigned to slaves. The servitude 
once associated with every kind of mechanical labor 



THE GOSPEL OF MANUAL LABOR. 113 

I suppose to be the real source of the still prevail- 
ing prejudice against it. The prejudice, I need not 
say, has absolutely no foundation in reason. No 
man in his senses will pretend that it has, — that 
any useful and productive art can degrade the 
workman employed in it. What constitutes re- 
spectability in any pursuit is, first, its utility, and 
second, its difficulty. Skilled and profitable labor, 
— that is the only true standard by which to esti- 
mate the merit and consequently the respectability 
of any craft or pursuit. Is it useful ? In answering 
that question regard must be had to the kind and 
degree of utility, — the final use being increase of 
life. Whatever increases the quantum of life is 
useful in tke measure in which it does that. Useful 
is all which ministers to the life of the body ; more 
useful is that which ministers to the life of the 
spirit. In one way or another we look for use. A 
work may be very difficult, but is not on that ac- 
count alone entitled to respect. The performance 
of a rope-dancer is difficult, but being attended with 
a minimum of use to those who behold it, cannot 
rank very high in the scale of human pursuits. On 
the other hand, a work may be very useful, but if 
it be one which requires little training and involves 
no skill in the operation, we hold it in less esteem 
than works of more difficult attainment. The indi- 
vidual engaged in it may have our highest respect 

8 



114 THE GOSPEL OF MANUAL LABOR. 

for the moral qualities which he brings to his task, 
for being faithful in that which is least; but the 
occupation itself we cannot rate very highly. The 
able and skilled workman in whatever craft or call- 
ing — mechanical or commercial, literary or scien- 
tific — is worthy of honor in the ratio partly of the 
skill and the rarity of the skill which he brings to 
his work, and partly of the value of the product. 
Reason acknowledges no distinction, and custom 
should acknowledge none in the honorableness of 
human employments which is not based on this 
criterion, — difficult to do and important to have 
done. 

Why should the exercise of a moderate degree of 
talent through the pen be more considered than the 
same amount of talent acting through the instru- 
mentality of the saw or plane ? Why should a 
second or third rate writer take precedence in so- 
cial esteem of a clever mechanic ? For my own 
part, I would rather be able to do something really 
useful with the hand than produce something of 
ephemeral and doubtful value with the brain. I 
would rather be the maker of a good pair of shoes, 
or a coat, or a creditable piece of joiner's work, than 
of most of the stories and poems and editorial es- 
says that pass current under the name of literature. 
Our literature so called is altogether in excess of 
the useful arts. 



THE GOSPEL OF MANUAL LABOR. H5 

It will seem, I fear, a vain undertaking to com- 
bat the views and uses of society in this particular. 
And certainly an immediate or speedy revolution 
of opinion and practice in relation to this matter is 
not to be expected. The only way in which, so far 
as I can see, the needful reform can be effected, is 
through the medium of education. Our present 
system of education is faulty in that it seeks and 
contents itself with a very one-sided development. 
We educate the brain, and except in the use of the 
pen, and perhaps, to a certain extent, of the pencil, 
we do not educate the hand. In some of the pub- 
lic schools of Massachusetts the girls are taught 
the use of the needle. That I consider a very im- 
portant step, — the most important that for many 
years has been taken in a right direction. Better 
than all the philosophy and rhetoric with which it 
has been the fashion to cram their minds, more 
educating than most of the studies pursued at 
school, is the use of the needle. But the boys, for 
the most part, at school and at college acquire no 
manual art but the use of the pen. Arrived at the 
age of twenty without having learned any other 
art, were there even no prejudice preventing, they 
will not be likely to turn to mechanical pursuits 
for a livelihood, but seek it in the use of the pen. 
It seems to be taken for granted that the sons of 
the rich and the well to do will not choose to em- 



116 THE GOSPEL OF MANUAL LABOR. 

brace such pursuits ; and those on the other hand 
whom circumstances seem to have destined to a 
life of mechanical labor are taken from the schools 
at too early an age, and bound to their destined 
trade with unfurnished minds and a knowledge only 
of the merest rudiments of intellectual training. 
Here is a double evil. The sons of the rich, the 
well educated, are virtually cut off from mechanical 
employments, even if their taste incline in that di- 
rection; while those who follow such employments 
— mechanics, artisans, who need to be thoroughly 
educated in all branches of polite learning as a 
counterpoise to a destined life of manual toil — 
grow up in comparative ignorance of all but the 
rules and relations of their particular craft, and 
thereby in part are defrauded of social estimation 
and converse with the highly educated which might 
otherwise be accorded to them. 

Answering to these evils, the two reforms most 
needed to establish a balance of industry and cor- 
rect the undue preponderance of sedentary and 
mercantile pursuits, are, first, that the sons of the 
rich without losing caste should be free to adopt a 
handicraft as a means of livelihood ; and second, 
that every mechanic should have the best education 
which the schools and universities here or any- 
where can give. I am fain to believe that these 
ends are in the order of social progress and among 



THE GOSPEL OF MANUAL LABOR. 117 

the events of coming time ; that the false system of 
education which separates intellectual from manual 
labor, denying to one half of mankind the highest 
culture of mind and manner, and consigning the 
rest to a weak and luxurious existence, rendering 
them unable in case of need to support themselves 
by their own handiwork, will be replaced by a 
broader discipline, embracing the whole man in its 
scope and aim. Those who have pondered these 
matters most deeply are agreed that man was made 
to labor with the hand as well as with the brain ; 
that unless he so labors he cannot fulfil the pur- 
pose intended in his physical organization ; and 
that, conversely, man is called to intellectual 
progress as well as to manual labor, and that 
unless his mind is disciplined and cultured, he 
fails of the purpose intended in his mental endow- 
ments. I am fain to believe that the time will 
come when the children of the rich as well as of 
the poor shall be trained to manual toil, when the 
children of the poor as well as of the rich shall 
have the opportunity of the highest culture, and 
when it shall be equally rare to be unskilled in 
some mechanical art and to have a barren mind. 

Among the cant phrases that vex the ear of the 
time is the often recurring expression, " the coming 
man." What the coming man is to be and to do, 
and not to be or to do, is a topic of frequent specu- 



118 THE GOSPEL OF MANUAL LABOR. 

lation of a harmless if not very profitable kind. 
My prophecy is that the coming man will be a 
working man. Whatever else he may drop or take 
up of old or new ideas, he will drop the conceit 
that there is anything degrading or prejudicial to 
gentility in manual labor, and take up the faith 
that the skilful and profitable use of the hand by 
man or woman is a truer patent of nobility, and a 
worthier passport to the best society than lordly 
lineage or heraldic device. And such a result will 
be but the consummation of a process which began 
with the first enfranchisement of labor, when Eu- 
rope emerging from feudal darkness began to per- 
ceive that industry is a better guaranty of national 
wealth than the sword. The course of history ever 
since has been a growing recognition of the rights 
of labor, and in spite of prescription, of hereditary 
privilege and aristocratic prejudice, a gradual ele- 
vation of the laborer. From a state of villenage 
he advanced to one of personal independence, then 
from personal independence to the point now at- 
tained of civil emancipation, from which the next 
step, that of social emancipation, is inevitable, 
when thorough education shall give the mechanic 
that inner emancipation which frees the soul from 
the bondage of circumstance, that wide and com- 
manding outlook which atones the inequalities of 
fortune, and that self-respect which compels the 



THE GOSPEL OF MANUAL LABOR. 119 

respect of mankind. . Social prejudices are not to 
be conquered by force ; they can only cease by 
being outgrown. The prejudice which undervalues 
manual labor will cease whenever it shall appear 
that manual labor is entirely consistent with the 
highest culture. 



IX. 

THE LOT OF THE CALLED. 

And Jesus, walking by the sea of Galilee, saw two 
brethren, Simon called Peter, and Andrew his brother, 
casting a net into the sea : for they were fishers. And 
he saith unto them, Follow me, and I will make you 
fishers of men. And they straightway left their nets, 
and followed him. Matt. iv. 18-20. 

A LL great and permanent reforms, especially all 
•^■^ religious movements that win for themselves 
a permanent place in the world, originate with 
" the people," — I mean, with the humbler classes, 
the uncultured poor. All religions have had this 
origin ; they have risen from beneath ; they have 
struck their roots in the lower strata of society, 
and gathered to their symbols the masses of the 
people, before winning the assent of the learned 
and the great, who at last are dragged in in spite of 
themselves, and swept away by the overpowering 
current of popular opinion. Confucius complained 
that the princes of his day rejected his doctrine ; 
but the doctrine of Confucius became the State 



THE LOT OF THE CALLED. 121 

religion of China, and has been so for more than 
two thousand years. Zoroaster found an ally in 
the King of Iran ; but the Magi and the courtiers 
and the men of influence in the land were leagued 
against him. Buddhism stooped to the vile and 
despised, and won its great triumph by its great 
condescension. Mohammed was spurned by the 
pride of the Koreish, and found his first disciple 
in a slave. 

Of this humble origin of wide-spread religions, 
Christianity is the supreme instance. When Jesus, 
by private exercises of the Spirit and by providen- 
tial leadings, had become persuaded of his high 
calling, and moved to undertake his saving mission, 
he deemed it necessary to associate with himself 
some trusty companions, to whom he could impart 
his mind and purpose, and who should assist in 
disseminating his doctrine. It was a matter of 
prime moment what manner of persons should be 
selected for this office. The first thought of an 
ordinary reformer would have been to draw to 
himself men of high position and commanding 
influence, to secure to himself the interest and 
prestige of rank and power. In our day, when a 
project is started which aims at social and moral 
reform, it is judged expedient to gain over people 
of mark, — the accredited leaders of society, — and 
to give the new movement all the authority which 



122 THE LOT OF THE CALLED. 

social distinction can secure. It appears that Jesus 
had received overtures from men of this stamp, but 
gave them no encouragement. When a ruler of 
the Jews undertook to treat with him, he told him 
plainly, It is in vain for you Pharisees to think you 
can enter this new kingdom, which I proclaim, on 
the strength of your old position ; you have got to 
be born again. Your aristocratic traditions will 
avail you nothing here ; you must throw aside all 
that, forget all you have learned, and begin anew. 
And so he turned from the leaders of the nation to 
its humblest citizens. The first whom he chose for 
his associates in this great work were two fisher- 
men ; then two more of the same craft ; then a 
tax-gatherer; and so on, — obscure men, poor, 
unlearned, rude. 

Why did Jesus select such before all others for 
his disciples ? Why peasants of Galilee, rather 
than educated Pharisees and Sadducees, — mem- 
bers of the Council, the aristocracy of the land ? 
He might have had such for his followers, had he 
chosen to accept the advances they made. Why 
not such, — men who by virtue of their command- 
ing position would make an impression on the pub- 
lic mind, and authorize a strong impression in 
favor of the new doctrine, would give it forth as 
from a height, that so, the heights being gained, 
the plains and valleys might be overawed and se- 



THE LOT OF THE CALLED. 123 

cured ? It is impossible to say how much of pru- 
dential calculation there may have been in this 
selection. I rather suppose that Jesus followed a 
divine instinct which taught him that these rude 
men were the fittest instruments for the work as- 
signed to them. He perceived in them something 
which especially qualified them for that vocation. 
Had the purpose of his mission been a system of 
theology such as after-ages have extorted from the 
gospel, he would, it is likely, have chosen men of 
erudition and intellectual discipline to be its mis- 
sionaries. Then scribes and Pharisees would have 
been the fittest expounders of his doctrine. But 
this was not the mission with which his disciples 
were charged. This was not the object which 
Christ had in view. He did not want teachers of 
theology, but competent witnesses, faithful report- 
ers, — men who were open to receive, and likely to 
deliver as they received, the truths which he taught. 
This was what Jesus required in his disciples ; and 
for this, Galilean peasants were better instruments 
than phylacteried Rabbins. They possessed one 
quality at least — the natural fruit of their condi- 
tion — which the learned and the rulers would have 
lacked, and which was very essential to constitute 
a competent minister of the New Testament ; 
namely, simplicity, freedom from prejudice and 
self-conceit. Had Rabbins undertaken the charge 



124 THE LOT OF THE CALLED. 

of the gospel, they would have made of it a Rabbini- 
cal affair, would have overlaid it with their tradi- 
tions, would have perverted it to uses and issues 
very wide of its original import. These men had 
no prepossessions of their own which would color 
or mar their testimony. They were unsophisti- 
cated. If they had much to learn, they had com- 
paratively little to unlearn. They needed not, as 
Christ said to Nicodemus, to be born again to for- 
get their prejudices ; they needed not to become as 
little children before they could see the kingdom of 
God. They were already in that condition ; they 
possessed this qualification in perhaps as great a 
degree as could be expected of any who were other- 
wise fit for the work. 

We see the same thing in every new manifesta- 
tion of the Spirit. The most apprehensive of new 
truths are they who are least preoccupied with 
theories of their own. And it seems, as I said, to 
be the law of all reforms that they originate with 
the unlearned, and grow, as the plant grows, from 
an obscure root in the earth, — grow gradually up 
into power and greatness, instead of descending 
from the heights of the world. Humanly speaking, 
it would have been well if all the fathers of the 
Church had been men of this stamp. We should 
then have had at this day the pure Christianity of 
Jesus, instead of that compound of dogmas and 



THE LOT OF THE CALLED. 125 

speculations, of Jewish and Gentile traditions, 
which has borne the name and honors of the gos- 
pel, and. in which it is so hard to sift the wheat 
from the chaff. I say, humanly speaking ; for 
there is another view of this subject, — a providen- 
tial historical view, — according to which the very 
additions and foreign speculations and uses which 
have gathered around the evangelical nucleus, have 
had their value and fulfilled their part in the 
scheme of Divine education. Pure Christianity is 
perhaps too pure, too ethereal, too spiritual, to act 
as a social organized power, to constitute a visible 
Church, without that body of extraneous matter 
which it gathers to itself from the various cir- 
cumstances, spheres, and minds amid which it is 
planted ; as the seed which is put into the ground, 
in order to appear an organized body, must take to 
itself something which is foreign to itself from the 
earth and air which surround it. The seed still 
maintains its proper type, and modifies these for- 
eign elements more than they modify it. And 
Christianity, though somewhat qualified by the me- 
dium of ecclesiasticism in which it works, on the 
whole subordinates that medium, and makes it the 
instrument of its own peculiar power. Indeed, all 
healthy, efficient organism is a compromise be- 
tween the ideal and the caricature of the principle 
embodied in it. 



126 THE LOT OF THE CALLED. 

Such were the two brothers, Simon and Andrew, 
whom Jesus summoned from their fishing to help 
evangelize the world: "Follow me, and I will 
make you fishers of men." "And straightway 
they left their nets, and followed him." There 
was no magic in this. It is not necessary to 
suppose that this was the first meeting between 
Jesus and these brethren. In all likelihood they 
had often met before, and were mutually ac- 
quainted. Jesus had seen something in these men 
which marked them for his own ; and they had 
known him as a teacher and prophet, — had looked 
to him, perhaps, as the promised Messiah. There 
is nothing wonderful in the readiness with which 
they accepted the summons, " Follow me." 

But what did they understand by it ? What 
views and expectations did they connect with it ? 
I suppose they thought very much as the rest of 
their countrymen did of the national Messiah. 
They saw in him a reformer indeed, and one who 
would rebuke the sins of the people ; but they saw 
in him also a potentate and prince who would over- 
throw the foreign usurper, and restore and occupy 
the national throne. In following him, they fol- 
lowed a victorious leader, who would not fail, when 
he came in his glory, to reward his own. We shall 
do them no injustice if we suppose that they obeyed 
an impulse of personal ambition in accepting the 



THE LOT OF THE CALLED. 127 

call to become fishers of men. Vague visions of 
Messianic prizes were floating before their minds. 
When they thought of the goal of their disciple- 
ship they clothed it in purple, and saw themselves 
in imagination sitting at the right and left of roy- 
alty. Little did they know or suspect of the real 
issues of that future which took such rosy promise 
in their imagination. Had they dreamed of the 
doom which their mission had in store for them, — 
the disappointment of their cherished hopes, the 
life of persecution and the martyr-death to which 
the Master was calling them, — they would hardly 
have been tempted to quit the old fishing-ground, 
and the safe though humble profits of their vocation. 
They would have been as prompt to reject the call as 
they were to accept it in the light in which they saw 
it. They accepted it in one sense ; it was inter- 
preted to them in a very different sense : they ac- 
cepted it as the earnest of future triumphs ; it was 
interpreted to them as a martyr's crown. And yet, 
when the real nature and result of their calling was 
revealed to them, they met it without shrinking. 
With the trial came the courage and the strength. 
Step by step each coming event brought its own 
preparation and support ; and they welcomed at 
length the martyr-death of the Christian confes- 
sion with the same alacrity with which they would 
have taken their places by the side of the con- 



128 THE LOT OF THE CALLED. 

queror's throne, had such been the lot appointed 
for them. 

A significant picture of human life is set before 
us in this example ; significant lessons are taught 
by it. Our condition is essentially that of these 
Galileans. We begin our career like them with 
expectations which are never to be realized in the 
way we had fancied, but in a way very different, if 
at all. We seek a kingdom, how different from 
the true one ! Our kingdom of heaven, — we may 
not call it by that name, — the good which we seek, 
by whatever name we call it, we see postponed from 
year to year. It comes not ; but instead of it, comes 
to patient continuance in well-doing a good which 
we did not seek, and could not understand till it 
came. Our expectations are not fulfilled in form, 
but they are fulfilled in the spirit to all who merit 
success. The highest good, as we understand it, 
that in which all our hopes and wishes centre, is 
the kingdom of heaven for us. Our life is an ex- 
periment to find that kingdom. The young man 
rushes on the future which tempts him with its 
prizes ; he sees profits, honors, social satisfactions, 
— external advantages of every sort. These at first 
are his kingdom of heaven, and these accordingly 
he pursues. God permits us to indulge in these 
pursuits to our heart's content ; he has placed no 
caution at the entrance of these paths, and all 



THE LOT OF THE CALLED. 129 

things lure us onward. We follow trustingly the 
temporal Messiah in hope of a temporal kingdom. 
We delude ourselves with a dream of happiness 
which flies before us as we pursue, and will not 
suffer itself to be clutched. But the pursuit has 
not been vain ; the time spent has not been lost. 
If it has not brought the satisfaction we desired, it 
has benefited us in a way we did not expect. It 
has served to educate us, to call forth our powers, 
to school our affections, to discipline our hearts. 
The industry and intellectual vigor to which it has 
trained us ; the habit it has formed of seeking hap- 
piness in action ; the trial it has furnished to our 
virtue ; the power of endurance it has brought out 
in us; the lessons of patience and renunciation 
which have come to us from its very failures and 
disappointments, — these are the prizes which have 
come to us from our pursuit. They did not enter 
into our calculation when we engaged in it. We 
were thinking of quite other things. We followed 
a temporal Messiah. It may be we have attained 
those other things also, but we have not found 
what we sought in them ; they have not yielded 
the looked-for satisfaction. It is not from them 
that our peace has come. What looked so tempt- 
ing in the distance has turned out to be something 
very different when grasped. We may call it ours ; 
but we cannot appropriate it with any such fruition 

9 



130 THE LOT OF THE CALLED. 

as it promised in the pursuit. The temporal Mes- 
siah has disappointed us ; but the true Messiah 
has been revealed. The kingdom which we had in 
our minds at the outset has failed. It never ex- 
isted but in our imagination ; but instead thereof, 
an entrance has been administered to us into an- 
other and better kingdom, — a kingdom of enlarged 
insight and ripe experience, of self-command and 
kind affections, of patience and of peace. 

The calling of these fishermen teaches that the 
life of the privileged, of the eminent, of those who 
are called in a special sense, is not a happy life, 
as happiness is commonly understood. It is not 
a life of ease, but of hardship. Those who are 
called to power and honor are called to toil and 
struggle. The greater our privileges, the harder 
our lot. 

No doubt these fishermen seemed to themselves, 
and were thought by their countrymen, to be pe- 
culiarly favored in being made the intimate com- 
panions of him who was expected to restore the 
kingdom to Israel. They were so, indeed, but not 
in the way which they had conceived. What 
seemed to them an omen of dignity and splendor, 
proved to be the herald of hardship and suffering. 
We are apt to look upon distinction as so much 
enjoyment. We think the most eminent, the high- 
est-placed, the loudest-called, to be the happiest. 



THE LOT OF THE CALLED. 131 

They are so in one sense ; since the highest hap- 
piness for man is the most thorough education and 
the most intense action of his powers, the most 
complete development of all that is in him. But 
if happiness means enjoyment, then eminence, so 
far from being synonymous with happiness, is sy- 
nonymous with sorrow. For every privilege which 
God confers, he imposes a corresponding burden 
of care and toil. The higher we ascend in the 
scale of being, the more life ceases to be enjoy- 
ment, the more difficult it becomes, the more of 
trial and of conflict it involves. 

Happiness is the property of children, the gift 
of God's love to that period of life, but not the des- 
tination of man. The destination of man is to 
labor and endure, to strive and produce. The 
higher his position, and the greater his privileges, 
and the more distinguished his endowments, the 
more apparent this destination becomes, the more 
sensibly it is felt, the more certainly it fulfils it- 
self. It is written : " All dignity is painful. For 
the son of man there is no crown, whether well 
worn or ill worn, but is a crown of thorns." 

Who have been the most eminent in the world's 
annals, — the heroes of history? We find them, 
for the most part, among the great sufferers of 
history ; and the more we learn of their private 
life, the more we find it to have been a life of 



132 THE LOT OF THE CALLED. 

conflict and sorrow. Their private confessions, 
where they have come down to us, show them to 
have been often weary of life, and to have felt 
their burden greater than they could bear. Even 
from the strong and high-hearted Luther escapes 
not unfrequently the sigh for the rest of the grave. 
The hero of our own history, the most honored of 
our countrymen, is said never to have smiled dur- 
ing all the period of the war which established our 
national independence. 

Need I remind you how strikingly this trait was 
exemplified in Him who stands in our grateful and 
affectionate reverence for all that is sublimest, as 
well as for all that is holiest, in man ? An immor- 
tal sadness clings inseparably to his idea. All the 
representations of him, in the paintings of the 
old masters, show how universal the impression, 
perhaps we should say the tradition, of this trait. 
And so intimately is this sadness associated with 
the idea of Christ, that Christianity has been 
termed, by those who have reflected most pro- 
foundly on its spirit, " the worship of sorrow," as 
exhibiting one who devoted himself to privation 
and suffering and death in the service of man, as 
the price of man's highest and eternal good ; and 
as calling on the followers of Christ to follow him 
in this also, — willing, if need be, to suffer with 
him, that so they may reign with him ; " bearing 



THE LOT OF THE CALLED. 133 

about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that 
the life also of Jesus might be made manifest" in 
them ; seeking their life, not in comfort and ease, 
but in toil and sacrifice. This is the doctrine of 
Christianity, — a doctrine for the most part peculiar 
to Christianity. For though traces of it, as of all 
great truths, may be found in the ancient philoso- 
phies, yet the spirit of those philosophies, on the 
whole, was eudaemonism, was Epicurean ; it made 
happiness the highest good. And this, I appre- 
hend, whatever their theory, is still the practi- 
cal philosophy of the greater part of mankind, — 
not the worship of sorrow, but the worship of 
enjoyment. 

Enjoyment is the childish ideal of good. It is 
this that floats before the mind at the entrance of 
life, and with many during its entire course. Even 
where ambition prompts to unwearied exertion, and 
persuades renunciation of present ease and sensual 
satisfactions for honors and possessions in the dis- 
tance, which seem more desirable than present 
enjoyment, it is still enjoyment in one shape or 
another which they pursue. It is still some phan- 
tom of future independence and ease, or of future 
mark and consequence, which beckons them on, 
and which renders endurable the sacrifices it de- 
mands. And not only does worldly ambition look 
to this end, but how often is religion itself de- 



134 THE LOT OF THE CALLED. 

graded to a worship of enjoyment by the repre- 
sentations which are made of its ends, and the 
motives by which its obligations are urged ; enjoy- 
ment with which some future state is to reward 
the toils and sacrifices of this ! Men are taught 
to worship enjoyment under the name of heaven ; 
and the popular doctrine has been, that, after 
suffering the inconveniences of righteousness in 
this present life, we are to take our ease in the 
life to come. 

Long time is required to correct this false ideal 
in religion and in all the pursuits of life, and to 
teach us that enjoyment is only a phantom with 
which God permits us to delude ourselves for 
a while, until we learn the deeper meaning and use 
of life, — until we learn that labor is the end of 
labor ; that its use is to educate us for further and 
endless toil ; that when we have done well, the 
reward of well-doing is the power and the privilege 
of doing better ; having been faithful in few things, 
to be made rulers over many ; not with additional 
comforts and ease, but with additional responsi- 
bilities, care, and toil. If we have been sharply 
tried, and have borne our trials well, the reward 
is new trials, which multiply so long as we are 
able to bear. 

God teaches all this by gradual discipline, if we 
are open to instruction. He has his ends with us 



THE LOT OF THE CALLED. 135 

quite distinct from our own. We set out with a 
theory which we have to unlearn ; we amuse our- 
selves with plans which we have to renounce. We 
mean to labor for a given time, and then take our 
rest. But God does not mean that we should rest 
so long as we are capable of labor. He keeps us 
at work; and the more we do, the more he lays 
upon us. If we have toiled for money, he does not 
permit us to sit quietly down and enjoy our gains, 
but keeps us at work as his stewards, or takes our 
riches from us that we may begin our work anew. 
If we labor too covetously, he makes the care of 
money at once our punishment and his treasurer. 
If we have done well, and earned credit in any 
undertaking, he does not permit us to sleep upon 
our laurels, but goads us on to new undertakings. 
If he sees in us a patient, brave, and self-sacrificing 
spirit, he does not afflict us once and then dismiss 
us, but heaps trial upon trial. At every turn he 
baffles and disappoints us, and yet wrings from us 
at last the strange confession, "Though he slay 
me, yet will I trust in him ; " and, correcting our 
false ideal, teaches us to find in brave and efficient 
service the kingdom of heaven, which we once 
sought in selfish enjoyment; instead of getting 
the uttermost, to seek our satisfaction in doing 
our best. 

So it fell out with these poor fishermen, who left 



136 THE LOT OF THE CALLED, 

their nets to follow the call of Jesus, not knowing 
whither they went. They embraced that call with 
buoyant heart and high hopes, seeing conquest and 
glory and golden crowns in the distance, and fiud- 
ing at every step disappointment, privation, dan- 
ger, and ending with a martyr-death. Assuredly 
the life of the called is not a happy life, in the 
ordinary sense of the term. The greater our priv- 
ileges, the harder our lot. The more we have and 
can, the more we are called to do and to bear. 

But courage! The God who appoints the disci- 
pline and the task is the same God who worketh in 
us to will and to do. The internal support is 
equal to the outward pressure ; and as our day, 
so is our strength. Had Andrew and Peter fore- 
seen the trials in store for them, how would they 
have spurned the Master's call, and shrunk with 
terror from such a life ! But they did not shrink 
when the trials came ; they found the strength 
where they found the call. And though one of 
them, in a moment of weakness, was tempted to 
deny his discipleship, he amply atoned for that 
weakness by his subsequent life, and, according 
to tradition, by his heroic death. Wherever there 
is a call to do or to bear, there is strength cor- 
responding to that call ; and what seemed impos- 
sible once, will seem easy and natural as we grow 
up to it by the gradual discipline of life. "It 



THE LOT OF THE CALLED. 137 

would not do for me to enlist" said a young man 
of feeble health and delicate organization, at the 
breaking out of the war, " I should prove a coward 
on the field of battle." But he did enlist, impelled 
by the irresistible call of patriotism, and showed 
himself, when the trial came, as brave as any vet- 
eran on the field ; and cheerfully, in the supreme 
hour, paid the tribute of his life to the sacred 
cause he had espoused. 

The life of the called is not a happy life, if hap- 
piness consists in selfish enjoyment ; nevertheless, 
it is a blessed life, if blessedness consists in con- 
sciously filling a place in the army of the faithful, 
and the fellowship of that spirit which animates 
all the brave and good. The limits of enjoyment 
are soon reached, the season of enjoyment is soon 
past; but life and blessedness have no bounds. 
The time is near when the having possessed a little 
more or a little less of this world's goods, the hav- 
ing experienced a little more or a little less of 
earthly delights, will be no longer matter of pleas- 
ure or regret. But the consciousness of having paid 
with our best for values received, of having borne 
our share of the common burden, and contributed 
something to the general good, will be rich com- 
pensation in view of all the past, and ample sup- 
port in view of all the future ; will be a satisfac- 
tion which we can take with us to our final rest, 



138 THE LOT OF THE CALLED. 

assured that the sundering of soul and body cannot 
wrest this treasure from our life, and that wher- 
ever, in the Divine economy, our waking may be, 
it will find us sound and furnished and girt and 
ready for the new career. 



X. 



THE BAPTIST AND THE CHRIST ; OR 
REFORMERS AND HUMANITY. 

He must increase, but I must decrease. 

John iii. 30. 

TOHN, the Baptist, had awakened in his country- 
** men an immense expectation of a greater than 
himself, about to appear, whose perfect work would 
eclipse his own initiatory doings, " the latchet of 
whose shoes," he said, " I am not worthy to un- 
loose." He may be in the midst of us, — that great 
Unknown ; for who knows the possibilities of his 
own sphere ? " There standeth one among you, 
whom ye know not; he it is, who coming after 
me is preferred before me." In accordance with 
this prediction, there appeared one day, among 
those who flocked to the baptism of John, a youth 
on whose radiant brow the manifest spirit of God 
had set its seal. The heavenly signature did not 
escape the penetrating eye of the Baptist. He 
looked upon this new-comer, and recognized in his 
kinsman Jesus the greater than himself who was 



140 THE BAPTIST AND THE CHRIST; 

to come. " This is he of whom I said, After me 
cometh a man which is preferred before me, for 
he was before me." 

Not many days after there came a message : 
" Rabbi, he that was with thee beyond Jordan, to 
whom thou barest witness, behold, the same bap- 
tizeth, and all men come to him." In a mind 
less pure and disinterested than John's, this an- 
nouncement might have kindled a spark of jeal- 
ousy, though it did but verify his own prediction. 
He, the greatest prophet since the great Elijah, 
saw himself already eclipsed and receding into the 
shadow of a name. Young as he was, he had had 
his day. Another coming after him was preferred 
before him. But John saw in this the divine au- 
thentication of his own mission. He knew that no 
vulgar caprice, but a higher claim, had caused this 
diversion of the popular favor. Grandly, as became 
his loyal nature, he submitted to be outdone. " A 
man can receive nothing, except it be given him 
from heaven. ... He that hath the bride [that is, 
the popular consent] is the bridegroom : but the 
friend of the bridegroom, which standeth and hear- 
eth him, rejoiceth greatly because of the bride- 
groom's voice : this my joy therefore is fulfilled. 
He must increase, but I must decrease." 

Of all the brave words recorded of John the Bap- 
tist there are none braver than these. There 



OR REFORMERS AND HUMANITY. 141 

are plenty of reformers who can raise their voice 
against the corruptions and evil-doers of their 
time ; how rare the reformer who knows his place, 
his limitations, and is willing to subside when his 
work is done, content to be the waiting paranymph 
of the ever-coming eternal bridegroom ! The Bap- 
tist and the Christ ! There are always these two 
parties and powers in the world, — the aggressive 
reformer and the Son of Man ; the uncompromising 
radical who would lay the axe to the root of the 
tree, and the spirit of humanity latent in all men, 
continually advancing, as the years roll by, toward 
the full stature of a perfect man, — the stature of 
" the fulness of Christ." This must increase ; that 
must decrease. They differ in their ideals, and 
they differ in their methods. The reformer's is 
non-conformity, everlasting protest against the 
world and its ways, asceticism with its rigors and 
its frown. The Christ's ideal is the life of society, 
with its kindly sympathies and reciprocities, its 
genial fellowships and its sweet humanities, its 
obligations and responsibilities, its marriage feasts 
and its houses of mourning, its Canas and its 
Bethanies, its graces and its burdens, its hilarities 
and its cross. The Baptist's ideal seduced not a 
few of the choicest spirits of the early Church. It 
drew Christendom into the wilderness, and threat- 
ened for a while to supplant the genuine gospel 



142 THE BAPTIST AND THE CHRIST; 

with the mystic glooms of Indian devotion. Sin- 
cere as it was in the purpose and practice of the 
early Christians, sublime as it was in its stern pro- 
test against the vices of a pampered, self-indulgent 
world, asceticism is not the true ideal of life. 

The ideal Christian is man in society, freely 
mingling with the world, partaking in its innocent 
uses while contending against the bad ; bearing its 
burdens, encountering its temptations and overcom- 
ing them, and honoring its just demands. This 
is the life that best promotes in the end the moral 
welfare of society. The life of dissent may be freer 
from temptation, but it is less fruitful. That must 
decrease. The voice in the wilderness passes, but 
humanity endures. The reformer's mission is 
transient ; he fulfils his course, utters his protest, 
and disappears in the stream of time. Advancing 
humanity renders back the protest in due season, 
accepts what truth there is in it, discarding what 
is false, and embodies it in that ever-progressing 
incarnation of divine ideas which constitutes the 
history within the history of human kind. 

They differ in their methods. The aggressive 
reformer proceeds by agitation. He strives and 
cries, he agonizes, he plots and he schemes, calls 
conventions, canvasses votes, intrigues, proscribes, 
legislates. Some good, no doubt, is accomplished 
in this way. Agitation is good in its measure and 



OR REFORMERS AND HUMANITY. 143 

place, but not for all things and times. It is not 
the method which permanently benefits society. 
Not agitation, but attraction, is the force that 
finally and forever redeems the world. All thor- 
ough and lasting reforms are due to the strong 
attraction of individual character ; and character 
acts by simply being. It needs no organ, but its 
own victorious nature. It reforms evil as the sun 
in the fable slew the dragon, by the glance of 
its eye, as Paul said Christ would destroy the 
" man of sin " by " the brightness of his coming." 
Other agencies may stop the present demonstra- 
tions ; but they do not reach the root of the evil, 
they do not reach the heart. The pressure of 
opinion, coalition, legislation, may hold vice in 
check, but it cannot turn the bitter waters into 
sweet. No external pressure can do this, but only 
personal influence, the flowing into us of another's 
soul. Interrogate your own experience. What 
have been the agencies by which your moral nature 
has been most quickened and fructified ? They 
have not been palpable and loud, not outward com- 
pulsion, but the irresistible attraction of some char- 
acter whose manifestations you have witnessed, some 
relative or friend or public functionary whom you 
respected and loved. From such sources as these 
our healing has come, and not from those who seek 
by force to bring us into their way and rule. 



144 THE BAPTIST AND THE CHRIST; 

The mightiest forces that we know, forces that 
sway the universe, are shod with silence. There is 
no speech nor cry ; their voice is not heard. No 
sound accompanies the undulations of the light 
which reaches the bounds of being. The snow 
and the rain fall silently on the waiting earth, and 
ripen the harvests that feed mankind ; the earth 
herself, a quiet wayfarer, awakes no echoes on her 
starry road. Such a force is character, of a piece 
with the light and the rain and the revolving year. 
What we call Christianity, apart from its politics 
and creeds, is but the character of Jesus as pre- 
sented in his life ; that immortal life which has 
written itself with indelible scriptures on the 
heart of the world, — a continuous galvanic cur- 
rent from that divine, inexhaustible battery. The 
Christian Church with all its ages is the self- 
perpetuating power of a human example. 

The impression of that example on Jesus' con- 
temporaries is indicated by certain anecdotes 
which make what is called his biography. These 
anecdotes are not his life, but only sparks struck 
out by its contact with the world. They do not 
explain the influence of his spirit on human so- 
ciety ; they only illustrate it. The recorded acts are 
not the ministry of Christ ; they are only its signs. 
The immediate results of his action were tran- 
sient. The eyes of the blind which he opened, soon 



OR REFORMERS AND HUMANITY. 145 

closed to open no more on the scenes of this world ; 
the feet of the lame whom he made to walk, soon 
stumbled on " the dark mountains ; " the dying 
whom he snatched from the grave were soon re- 
manded to the sleep of death ; but the spirit of 
divine beneficence displayed in those works re- 
mains. This must increase, and glorify itself with 
ever-increasing sway. 

It is not what we do, but the spirit with which 
we do it, that tells. The immediate results of all 
our action are inconsiderable. The glory of all 
human achievements is as the flower of the grass ; 
" the wind passeth over it, and it is gone." The 
spirit with which we work alone endures. That lives 
when our work is done. Believe in the silent force 
of character, in the indestructible efficacy of a life 
spent in the daily discharge of unnoticed offices of 
love, — not unnoticed : God giveth his angels charge 
of such ; the heavenly hosts are commissioned to 
gather up that wayside seed, and to propagate it 
forever and forever. 

The professed reformers have a mission to 
destroy, but not to build up. They may by the 
blessing of God abate existing evils, but they can- 
not replace them with positive good. The good, if 
it come, must be a product of humanity flowering 
in its season to meet this want. This is not said 
by way of disparagement, but only as defining the 

10 



146 THE BAPTIST AND THE CHRIST; 

work of reform. God knows how essential and 
divine a thing it is to destroy the bud, to bruise 
but one head of the old hydra that has wound itself 
with a ninefold coil about the heart of the world. 
Still, that work is negative, and therefore transient. 
The serpent can be finally crushed only by the 
positive forces of a higher civilization, — a civiliza- 
tion which has drunk more deeply of the blood of 
Christ. As the coming of the first man displaced 
the saurian monsters of the old creation, so the 
ever-new coming of the second man will in due 
time suppress the moral monsters of the human 
world. No aggressive reform, but only redeeming 
love, can replace with new verdure and a better 
harvest the desolation they have made. 

Aggressive reform must decrease because of the 
impurities it inevitably contracts in the prosecu- 
tion of its ends. Reform in its first stage is simply 
protest against some prevalent mischief or vice ; a 
voice in the wilderness crying, "Repent!" to all 
who are guilty in that kind. So long as it abides 
in that first stage it is pure and purifying. These 
early reformers are true sons of God. Happy are 
they who hear the word and receive it. But there 
follows often a second stage in which reform has 
parted with something of its original purity, and 
got itself mixed with foreign elements. The re- 
former quits his station in the wilderness, and 



OR REFORMERS AND HUMANITY. 147 

rallies his forces in organized bodies, hoping by 
that means to secure the more rapid suppression 
of the evil he condemns. Organization for moral 
purposes may sometimes be expedient, but reform 
loses something of its simplicity thereby. The re- 
former is no longer single-minded ; he has a second 
object beside his original one, — namely, the strength 
and success of his party. To this he must some- 
times sacrifice his individual convictions, giving 
implied sanction to measures he does not approve, 
that the union and integrity of the party may not 
suffer by his dissent. He no longer trusts in the 
power of simple truth, but relies on numerical 
force. He would conquer by the multitude of 
voices, instead of persuading by the influence of 
example. He contends more for victory than for 
truth. 

When the organization takes a political direction 
and presents itself as a party at the polls, reform 
undergoes still further diminution of its moral 
character. Its weapons have become carnal; the 
political element absorbs the moral. Moral aims 
are confounded with political ends and subordi- 
nated to them ; philanthropic zeal is merged in the 
struggle for power political. Suppose the party 
with which the reformers have allied themselves 
to succeed in carrying the popular vote, and secur- 
ing as legislators and magistrates the professed 



148 THE BAPTIST AND THE CHRIST; 

representatives of their cause. How far will that 
success effect the abolition of the evil to be re- 
formed ? Legislation may control the means of 
vicious indulgence. It may make illicit what be- 
fore was legal. But legislation can only deal with 
what is overt; it cannot reach the private home, 
still less the private soul. The evil fruit it may 
for the time suppress, but the corrupt tree remains. 
I do not say that suppression of the overt evil is 
not a good work, or that the reform which seeks 
that suppression is not needed, but only that it 
works no radical cure. Make the tree good if you 
would have good fruit ; abolish the demand for 
vicious indulgence, if you would once for all cut 
off the supply : there is no other way. 

The world is not permanently reformed by legis- 
lation. Philanthropists may wail over it, politi- 
cians may tug at it and tinker it ; but history will 
have its course. It obeys the law impressed upon 
it by divine rule ; and only the gradual unfolding of 
the good seed which God originally implanted in 
the human breast, and has nourished by successive 
revelations of the true and the right, will effectu- 
ally reform society. "He must increase." Every 
aspiration which has the well-being of man for its 
object, every dream of philanthropy, is bound to 
become a reality in the fulness of time. There is 
no good which reform has contended for that 



OR REFORMERS AND HUMANITY. 149 

time and advancing humanity will not one day 
render to our patient hope. The strong years are 
laboring for us and with us. They will not hurry 
and they will not stay. They keep the seed en- 
trusted to them ; they keep it and they rear it, and 
their harvests fail not. 

" 1 must decrease." Reformers pass ; humanity 
remains. With Christ for its head and God for 
its method and its goal, it must increase forever. 
Transcending and subordinating all partial re- 
forms, it takes from each whatever it can appropri- 
ate, and casts aside what is incompatible. Greater 
than all individuals however gifted, purer than all 
cultures however refined, it receives into itself the 
contributions of every land and time. It feeds it- 
self with streams from east and west and north 
and south, and grows stronger and purer the far- 
ther it flows. Science cannot trace its beginning, 
nor predict its issues ; but faith knows that a spirit 
greater than itself is co-present to every stage of its 
course, and is guiding it by infallible methods to 
immortal ends. 



XI. 

THE BKOAD CHUKCH. 

And they shall come from the east, and from the 
west, and from the north, and from the south, and shall 
sit down in the kingdom of God. Luke xiii. 29. 

\\ 7E all know how utterly and astonishingly 
* this prediction was verified in the first cen- 
turies of the Christian Church, which is what is 
here meant by the kingdom of God. Fifty days 
after the death of Christ, in whose tomb it was 
seemingly extinct, and whose resurrection was 
then the private persuasion of a few friends, the 
soul of that kingdom burst forth again with irre*- 
pressible vehemence at Jerusalem. It swept the 
city with a rushing mighty wind from heaven, and 
a demonstration of fiery tongues, inaugurating the 
new heavens and the new earth of the Christian 
ages. Three thousand souls sat down in the 
kingdom by invitation of Peter that day. East, 
west, north, and south were all represented. For 
there were dwelling at Jerusalem at that time 
Jewish proselytes " out of every nation under 



THE BROAD CHURCH. 151 

heaven," providentially gathered to the feast of 
the tribes, — Parthians, Medes, Elamites, from the 
east ; people from the parts of Libya about Cyrene, 
strangers of Rome, Cappadocians, Phrygians, from 
the west and the north ; and dwellers in Mesopota- 
mia from the south. When this rushing mighty 
wind struck them it lodged a seed of the kingdom 
in their souls, which they took with them to their 
proper homes, and sowed in their several lands, 
where it grew to be a heavenly plantation, a spir- 
itual oasis amid the perishing polytheisms of 
the Empire and the droning synagogues of the 
Dispersion. 

These plantations were replenished and rein- 
forced from time to time by missionaries, apostolic 
and other, from the old centre and the neighbor 
lands. Paul went to Arabia and Asia Minor and 
Greece and Italy, some say to Spain, — to what 
was then the uttermost verge of the West. 
Thomas, according to tradition, went to the utter- 
most verge of the East. Philip, by mediation of 
a household officer of the Queen of Meroe, whom 
he baptized on the road to Gaza, planted the word 
far down in the South. Others, most likely dis- 
ciples of Paul, carried it to Britain, high up in the 
North. The plantations grew, and flourished, and 
spread. The Empire writhed under them, and 
made desperate efforts to throw them off ; and no 



152 THE BROAD CHURCH. 

wonder, for they rode the Empire as a green and 
lusty parasite rides some huge bole of a thousand 
rings, the monarch of the forest, which, vast and 
robust as it is, must finally succumb to the stealthy 
encroachment. 

The plantations grew and spread till they ran 
together into a kingdom of God, which covered the 
earth, the known and travelled earth, of that time. 
Cosmas, the great navigator of the sixth century, 
found Christianity established in Malabar ; he 
found Christian churches and bishops in Ceylon, 
whose " spicy, breezes" had pleaded, and not in 
vain, with the saints aforetime, as they pleaded in 
saintly Heber's day, for missionary effort. Al- 
ready from uttermost China, jealous then as now 
of her own productions, the Emperor Justinian 
had received, through Christian missionaries, the 
secret of the silkworm ; and thus, as sceptic Gib- 
bon confesses, a Christian mission had accom- 
plished what secular commerce had labored in vain 
to effect, — the introduction of the silk culture into 
Europe. There were Christians at the mouth of 
the Ganges, Christians in " distant Aden," Chris- 
tians in Ormuz and in Abyssinia. Saracen hordes 
from the heart of the great desert had listened to 
Saint Simeon from the top of his prison column, and 
received the gospel at his hands. In Persia, Chris- 
tian bishops had overthrown the temples of the 



THE BROAD CHURCH. 153 

sun. On the slopes of the Caucasus a Georgian 
king and queen, themselves instructed by a Chris- 
tian slave, had succeeded in evangelizing their 
people. Meanwhile, at the other extremity, Ire- 
land, converted by holy Patrick as early as the 
fifth century, was known as the " Island of Saints," 
the school of Christian Europe, and a centre of 
spiritual light. The savage Goth was tamed into 
a peaceful confessor of the Gospel of peace, and, 
German-like, must have the word in his native 
tongue. Learned Jerome, in his cell at Bethle- 
hem, translating the Bible into Latin, is aston- 
ished by a message from two Goths inquiring the 
true meaning of certain passages in the Psalms. 
" Who would believe," he says, " that the barbarian 
tongue of the Goth would inquire concerning the 
sense of the Hebrew original, and that, while the 
Greeks were sleeping, the Germans would be in- 
vestigating the Word of God ? " A very significant 
fact it is, that the first translation of the Scriptures 
into German, the language of a rising world and of 
modern thought, was contemporary with the first 
authoritative translation into Latin, the language 
of mediaeval thought and a dying world. 

So mightily grew the Word, and prevailed ; and 
so it was that geographically east and west and 
north and south sat down in the kingdom of God. 
And in our day, though other religions may num- 



154 THE BROAD CHURCH. 

ber more disciples, there is none so widely diffused 
as the Christian, — none that can vie with it in 
geographical extent, — none which embraces so 
many latitudes and longitudes and differing na- 
tionalities. A few meridians include the boasted 
millions of Hinduism and of Islamism. When 
daylight dies along the waves of the Caspian, it 
disappears to all the worshippers of Buddha ; 
when " sets the sun on Afric's shore, that instant 
all is night" to the followers of Mohammed; 
but Christendom is a kingdom on which the sun 
never sets, where east and west and north and 
south sit down together, and earth's extremities 
join hands. 

But the prophecy of our Lord has another mean- 
ing and fulfilment besides the geographical one we 
have been discussing. The kingdom of God has 
other distinctions and relations, divergences and 
approximations, than those of space. The spiritual 
horizon has its polarities as well as the material. 
There are cardinal points of the spirit, as decided 
in their peculiarities as east and west and north 
and south, and, like these divisions of the compass, 
organic constituents of the spiritual world, neces- 
sary each to its orbed completeness and indispen- 
sable to its very being. Viewing the prophecy in 
this light, it expresses the spiritual completeness of 
the kingdom of God, or the Christian Church, as 



THE BROAD CHURCH. 155 

well as its geographical extent. East, west, north, 
south, may be regarded as typifying different ten- 
dencies and qualities of the spirit, — the east, sta- 
bility, conservatism ; the west, mobility, progress ; 
the north, internal activity, the inner life, ideal- 
ism, mysticism ; the south, exterior productiveness, 
ritualism, symbolism, ecclesiastical organization. 

All these tendencies and types of spirit were 
represented in the primitive Church, — the Church 
of the Apostles. We find them all in the New 
Testament. The element of stability — the con- 
servative element — was impersonated in Peter, 
and still ntore decidedly in James, first Bishop of 
Jerusalem, — in general, we may say, by that first 
Jerusalem church, which adhered so strongly to 
the Old Covenant, to Moses and Mosaism, that in 
fact it was only a Jewish sect, — a synagogue dif- 
fering from other synagogues only in the one tenet 
that Jesus was the Christ. The antagonist princi- 
ple of progress, how perfectly it was incarnated in 
Paul, the daring innovator, founder of cosmopoli- 
tan Christianity, who burst the bonds of Judaism, 
cut loose from the moorings of the Old Covenant, 
and carried the New to the Gentile West. 

If we look for traces in this age of the idealistic, 
mystical spirit, we find them clear and decided in 
the Gospel and First Epistle of John, whose author 
thought more of the invisible Church than of the 



156 THE BROAD CHURCH. 

visible, and less of the Jewish historical Christ 
than he did of the eternal Christ, the Divine Word 
incarnated in him, whose God was not the Jehovah 
of the Jews, but light and love, and who in his in- 
wardness and ideality is the prototype of the mys- 
tics and quietists of later time. 

Finally, the ritual and symbolical side of reli- 
gion was also represented in the primitive Church 
and in the New Testament. The Epistle to the 
Hebrews finds in all the ceremonial of Judaism the 
foretype of Christian sanctities ; and the Book of 
Revelation under the figure of the New Jerusalem 
contemplates a Christian church which is some- 
thing more than the spiritual fellowship of believ- 
ers, — a close organization, a compact, corporate 
institution, with the powers and functions pertain- 
ing to such a body. 

What is true of the primitive Church and the 
undeveloped Christianity of the apostolic age, how 
much rather is it true of every subsequent age of 
the Church ! When Eastern and Western Chris- 
tendom divided in the irreconcilable antagonism of 
their views and claims, in spite of the geographical 
separation, the spiritual compass remained unim- 
paired and complete. The Western Church, with 
which our Protestant Christendom more immedi- 
ately connects itself, had still its spiritual east and 
west, its north and south. Through all the period 



THE BROAD CHURCH. 157 

of the Middle Age these types are present, and 
these tendencies at work. Take the culmination 
of the Roman hierarchy. The period of the great- 
est consolidation and seeming uniformity was also 
that of the greatest internal divergency. If con- 
servatism reigned undisputed on the seven hills, 
reform was triumphant in the gorges of the Jura 
and the valleys of Provence ; if ritualism was ram- 
pant in one quarter, idealism had reached its cli- 
max in another. Peter the Venerable is oracle 
here ; Peter de Bruys is oracle there. The mighty 
Innocent in his pride of place is constrained to 
approve the beggar from Assisi, whose ominous 
career he would fain have suppressed, but that 
policy finds the popular preacher less dangerous 
within the Church than out of it. While Thomas 
Aquinas is seeking to perpetuate the past, and to 
fix the sum of theology in inexpugnable and irre- 
vocable dogmas, Raymond and Oliva and others 
are proclaiming the " Everlasting Gospel " of hu- 
man progress, and announcing a new age and a 
new dispensation of the Holy Spirit. 

If now we come to the world of our own time, 
to the Protestant Christendom of to-day, we find 
there also — regarding Protestantism externally 
and historically as one movement — a complete 
church, in which east and west and north and 
south are all represented. Protestant Christen- 



158 THE BROAD CHURCH. 

dom is bounded on the east by the Rocky Moun- 
tains of immovable Orthodoxy, on the west by the 
River of Free Inquiry, on the north by the White 
Sea of Mysticism, on the south by the Gulf of 
Prelacy, which divides it from the Church of 
Rome. In other words, Calvinism at one extrem- 
ity, and Universalism at the other, Quakerism and 
Spiritism on this hand, and Episcopacy on that, 
define this spiritual kingdom and attest its com- 
pleteness. But though Protestantism as a whole, 
externally and historically considered, exhibits 
this compass and variety, it is one of the evils of 
Protestantism that, internally and practically, it is 
not a whole, but a chaos of disunited, independent 
states, having no ecclesiastical fellowship with 
one another. The Protestant Christian, however 
catholic his own temper and views, is practically 
shut up within the fold of a sect which, if liberal, 
is excluded by all the rest, and which, if illiberal, 
excludes them. If a native of the east, it is not 
lawful for him to sit down with them of the west ; 
if he come from the west, he is an offence to the 
saints of the east; if inclined to the north, he is 
cut off from the sympathies of the south ; if 
reared in the south, he is early imbued with a holy 
horror of the north. The only way to obviate this 
evil in each particular communion is by individual 
tolerance to strive for completeness within that 



THE BROAD CHURCH. 159 

fold. Each sect should seek, so far as practicable, 
to be a catholic, complete church. A sect is then 
in a healthy state when a due admixture of con- 
servatism and liberality, of speculation and activ- 
ity, of idealism and formalism, answering the 
condition and satisfying the necessities of different 
minds, supplies all the elements of ecclesiastical 
edification, and completes the spiritual horizon. 
East, west, north, and south must unite in every 
kingdom of God, and every sect is in theory such a 
kingdom. 

1. Every church must have its east. The east 
is the region of steadfastness, of perpetuity. The 
terrestrial east, the geographical east, the old 
Asian world, has had historically this character, — 
the home of aboriginal, imperishable light, of eter- 
nal dominion and unchangeable custom. Every 
church must have its conservative side, its point 
of resistance, its fixed fact, its morning sun of un- 
changeable verity, — something eternal, immu- 
table, sufficing. And what should that be but the 
Christ, God's Christ and our Christ, the same yes- 
terday, to-day, and forever, the spiritual sun of 
our human world ? Fundamental and indispen- 
sable to every true church is the idea of Christ, — 
not the moral teacher and philosopher, a Jewish 
Socrates or Confucius, but Christ, the Son of man 
and the Son of God, impersonation of the divine- 



160 THE BROAD CHURCH. 

human, never as a name and a sanctity to be set 
aside or superseded, however the doctrines and 
views connected with that name may change and 
disappear with the course of time. In fact, that 
name is the only one of a veritable, historical per- 
sonage, that has had the power to organize his- 
tory, — not the history of this or that tribe, but 
the world's history, — to thread the nations and 
the ages on the string of an idea, and to bind them 
in oecumenical relations to the throne of God. It 
was this that laid hold of the New World, and — 
what commerce and conquest could not do — at- 
tached it to the Old, and gave to these States the 
spiritual results of the past without the tedium of its 
processes. No name has spanned such chasms and 
schisms of thought and life. None carries with it 
such pledge of perpetuity. What changes may yet 
pass upon society, what revolutions, political, eccle- 
siastical, moral, may toss and convulse and remodel 
the Church and the world, surpasses the sagacity 
of man to predict. But of this be sure, — this, 
even amid the darkness and the deeps, the uncer- 
tainty, perplexity, and agony of time, through 
which humanity is now groping its perilous way, 
we may venture to affirm, — that the name of 
Christ and its sacred import will surmount all and 
survive. All the tempests that sweep society will 
not pluck the idea of divine humanity incarnate in 



THE BROAD CHURCH. 161 

Christ from the soul of man and the path of history. 
So long as the sun which makes our natural day 
shall rise in the east and hasten on to the west, 
that diviner sun which makes our soul's day will 
continue to rise on each successive generation and 
accompany each to their rest. 

Other ideas there are, necessarily connected 
with that of Christ — ideas of man's nature and 
calling and destiny, of reconciliation and atone- 
ment in Christ, — ideas underlying, but by no 
means identical with, the dogmas of the sects, 
which are also original constituents of the Gospel, 
and therefore necessary elements in a true Chris- 
tian church. Every church is bound to respect 
them, and in virtue of them every church must 
have its conservative side, its cardinal east, the 
eye of its horizon, the salient principle and start- 
ing-point of its spiritual life. 

2. Then, secondly, each church must have its 
west. The west, in our interpretation of this 
Scripture, stands for mobility, variety, progress. 
Our own west, this young continent, with its rapid 
and amazing growths, its spreading populations, 
its ever-multiplying ways of communication, its 
endless traffic, and its shifting customs, suggests 
this use of the term, type as it is of mobile and 
progressive life. Every church should be flexile 
and plastic enough in doctrine and discipline to 

11 



162 THE BROAD CHURCH. 

allow of growth ; it must not assume to have all 
truth and all knowledge in its traditions, to be 
" perfect and entire, wanting nothing," nor think 
to confine the action of the mind, to limit the 
progress of inquiry, and to tie Christianity forever 
to its creed. Christianity, though bound to a 
given idea and to certain immutable truths, is 
not, for the rest, a fixture, but a movement and 
a growth ; not a divinely established system of 
views and institutions and immutable forms of 
thought and life, but a flowing demonstration of 
the spirit in such forms and aspects and embodi- 
ments as each successive age required, or was 
fitted to apprehend and to profit by, — a series 
of evolutions in which truths and principles un- 
changeable in their essence are variously expressed 
to differing minds in different times, — a progres- 
sive revelation of God in Christ. That such is 
the true and providential character and destiny 
of our religion is evident in the writings of the 
New Testament, when we compare the statement 
of Christianity in the first chapters of the Acts 
with the statement of it in the Epistles to the Co- 
rinthians and the First Epistle of John. We see 
there the immense stride which the Church made 
in the age of the Apostles, and in their hands, 
from Jewish Christianity to universal Christianity, 
from a national polity to the faith of mankind. 



THE BROAD CHURCH. 163 

The march thus inaugurated did not stop for 
nearly a thousand years, and then only slackened 
in the darkness and storm of the feudal night. It 
has never really stopped to this day ; when in one 
organization it found itself hampered and brought 
to a stand, it burst into schism and resumed the 
movement in a new. The Holy Spirit, whose body 
is the Church, does not bind itself to uniformity 
of doctrine or rite, but adapts itself to different 
minds and times. The spirit is one ; but there are 
differences of administrations and diversities of 
gifts, divergent views and dissentient tongues, one 
Lord and many confessions, unity in variety. This 
is the method and law of the Church universal; 
and each particular church and connection should 
respect in this the mind of the Spirit, not seek to 
impose a uniform system of belief, not insist on a 
single solution of every question, but open itself 
to free discussion, tolerate dissenting views, allow 
full scope to philosophic speculation within the 
limits of the Christian idea, and maintain an open 
and liberal west, as well as a close and steadfast 
east. 

3. And further, every church must have its 
north. The north I have designated as the region 
of idealism, which, in religion, soon turns to mys- 
ticism. The terrestrial north, with its atmospheric 
peculiarities, its magnetic mysteries and auroral 



164 THE BROAD CHURCH. 

splendors, indicating as it were a nearer com- 
merce with the skies, may seem to warrant this 
designation. The Puritan genius of our Ameri- 
can churches has no affinity and little patience 
with what is called mysticism, inclining rather to 
literal interpretations and surface views. But 
mysticism is a very important element in religion, 
— a feeling after God, "if haply we may find him." 
It is that by which religion lays hold of the invisi- 
ble and enters into fuller, that is, more conscious 
and intimate, communion with the spiritual and 
heavenly world. Without it there is danger that 
the Church will lose the consciousness of God, and 
become a distant province of God's kingdom, — 
an outlying colony, governed by deputies, instead 
of that kingdom itself, with God in Christ for its 
present and conscious home-government and head. 
When the Church in ages past had become that, 
or was threatening to become it ; when the Roman 
hierarchical polity had slipped its holdings, cut it- 
self off from the invisible by its earthliness and 
secularity, and set itself up for an independent 
kingdom, with Rome for its heaven and a pope for 
its God, there arose in the order of Providence the 
great mystics of the twelfth and thirteenth centu- 
ries, the new fathers, not inferior to the old, who 
restored the Church to the fellowship and com- 
munion of the Holy Spirit. Who can read with 



THE BROAD CHURCH. 165 

attention the Gospel of John, and not see how a 
tincture of mysticism deepens and quickens and 
intensifies what is best and holiest in religion ! 
How much more profound the Christianity there, 
than that of the other Gospels ! How much more 
intimate the author's communion with the soul of 
Christ, and his appreciation of Christian truth ! 
The other Evangelists give us a prophet; the fourth 
gives us the Word made flesh. If we were to 
strike from the library of Christian literature the 
writings which could best be spared, they would 
be the folios of systematic theology, the Bodies of 
Divinity, so called, — those weary compilations in 
which massive and useless dogmatic edifices are 
reared on the oldness of the letter, with no ap- 
parent apprehension in the writers of the deeper 
import which the letter conceals. But if we were 
to select from the writings of the Church the 
works which we would not willingly let die, the 
works to be preserved and handed down, they 
would be those mystic compositions of the Roman 
and Protestant communions, which, though little 
read by the flighty readers of this time, are felt to 
be given by inspiration of God, and to be invalu- 
able for suggestion and reproof and "instruction 
in righteousness," — the writings of Anselm and 
Thomas a Kempis and Tauler and Fenelon and 
Jacob Boehme and William Law, — inexhaustible 



166 THE BROAD CHURCH. 

treasuries of fructifying thought, and celestial mon- 
itors of heart and life. Something of mysticism is 
inseparable from devotion. Every prayer which 
we breathe, which is not a formal offering or a 
begging for temporal good, but a genuine aspira- 
tion, a gushing up from the deep heart, a yearning 
after God, is a mystical act, and if analyzed and 
referred to the fundamental principle involved in 
it, will be found to point to mystical theories of 
man and God. I say, then, that mysticism in this 
sense is a necessary element of religion, and can 
never be wanting in a true church. It is this that 
keeps the heavens open, and God near, and the soul 
awake, Nature holy, the word significant, and life 
divine. Every church that is sound and flourish- 
ing will welcome gladly and cherish kindly this 
mystic northern light, whose very eccentricities 
and dancing meteors, the sportive gleams and wild 
coruscations which seem so unpractical, confess at 
least a sublime aspiration, prophetic, it may be, of 
a better life, when heaven and earth shall meet 
in eternal day. 

4. Finally, the Church must have its south. 
A church requires a ritual, requires symbols and 
sacraments, — something outward as the exponent 
and medium of ecclesiastical life. The teeming 
and exuberant south, with its tropical luxuriance, 
fertile of forms, abounding in varied and organic 



THE BROAD CHURCH. 167 

life, may serve to typify this side of religion and 
the Church, — its organism, — by which term I 
comprehend whatever pertains to worship and 
communion and corporate action. The necessity 
of organization to a church, the necessity of ritual 
or something corresponding thereto in the way of 
worship, and of some description, however simple, 
of ecclesiastical polity, is proved — if the nature of 
things and the laws of life are not sufficient for 
that purpose — by the case of the first, the abo- 
riginal church, and the example of the Apostles. 
Jesus prescribed no form that we know, and none 
was needed so long as the Master himself was 
present, the fountain-head and lord of life, to fill 
and to bind the Church of his disciples. Its or- 
ganization was then spontaneous ; life from the 
living source pervading the whole, a flowing artic- 
ulation from moment to moment of thought and 
love. But no sooner was the Master withdrawn 
than his followers began to organize at once both 
worship and life, and we find them in those first 
days joining in litanies, choosing officers, assigning 
functions, establishing a commonwealth, and hold- 
ing councils. The Holy Spirit which was poured 
upon them took to itself an organic body, and 
became articulate in forms and rites. And from 
that time to this, formal worship, liturgical devo- 
tion, and ecclesiastical organization have been co- 



168 THE BROAD CHURCH. 

ordinate, or nearly so, with the Christian name. 
Whatever exceptions there may be but confirm 
the rule. If any movement of dissent from the 
doctrine and practice of a given church has failed 
to organize devotion and action, it has passed 
away, or is passing; it has been absorbed, or is 
destined to be absorbed, by other sects, in which 
the vital principle is more energetic and organise. 
A church without a ritual, without symbols and 
sacraments and a corporate organism, as a per- 
manent institution, is an impossibility, a contra- 
diction in terms. The religious sentiment, it is 
true, is spontaneous and eternal ; in one form or 
another it will always exist where man exists ; 
but this spontaneous religion, unfixed and uncer- 
tain, may so degenerate as to become an evil rather 
than a good. There is no absolute religion for 
man, but only particular, given religions. And 
any particular religion, as the Christian, for exam- 
ple, preserves its identity by means of symbols, 
without which what is Christian this year may 
turn to heathen the next. Religion craves expres- 
sion, — a permanent religion, a stated expression ; 
a common religion, a common worship and com- 
mon rites. In other words, religion requires a 
church for its exponent ; and a church requires a 
ritual for its medium, and a corporate organism 
for its conservation. The individual may feel no 



THE BROAD CHURCH. 169 

want of symbol or sacraments, and no satisfaction 
In them. It is because the religious sentiment in 
him is imperfectly developed, or not of the genuine 
Christian type. And though the individual may 
do without them, a church cannot. A fatal weak- 
ness inheres in the church that wants or neglects 
them ; its doom is writ, its dissolution is sure. 
A true church with other requirements and be- 
longings will have and cherish this southern side 
of ritual worship, this southern principle of organic 
life ; and however its antecedents and its exigen- 
cies may forbid the tropical luxuriance of the 
Church of Rome, where ritual runs to mummery 
and organization to despotism, it will reverence at 
least and hold fast whatever in the way of sym- 
bol and rite belongs by tradition to its proper 
constitution. 

These four, represented by and representing the 
fourfold completeness of the spiritual horizon, east, 
west, north, and south, — stability and progress, 
ideal and ritual, — are the cardinal constituents of 
a true church. To which we must add, as the com- 
plement and crown of the whole, the Charity which 
binds and pervades and harmonizes all, — that 
supreme grace of the Christian dispensation, Love 
manifest in works of social reform, in ministra- 
tions to the poor and suffering, in health to the 
sick, and light to them that sit in darkness, and 



170 THE BROAD CHURCH. 

the opening of the prison to them that are bound. 
The church in which these elements unite is a 
broad church, though numbering its disciples not 
by millions, but by hundreds or by tens. A holy 
catholic church it is, though the smallest sect in 
Christendom, and excommunicated by all the rest. 
I believe in the Broad Church thus defined. Ac- 
cording to the creed of the Fathers, " I believe in 
the Holy Catholic Church," — not that which con- 
sists in masses and indulgences, in manipulations 
and genuflexions, and infallibility and a breadcn 
God, but that which consists in faith and progress 
and devotion and love. Let each church labor in 
its place and kind to develop and assert this catho- 
licity, and the boundary lines which divide the sects 
shall be washed clean out in the gracious life that 
shall flood them all, and fuse them all into one pre- 
vailing kingdom of God, whose unshut gates shall 
exclude none that desire to enter, and where east 
and west and north and south shall meet in peace 
and join in praise. 



XII. 

LOVE CANCELS OBLIGATION. 

Owe no man anything, but to love one another. 

Romans xiii. 8. 

/ TPHE first clause of this precept, taken by it- 
self, demands an impossibility. We may dis- 
charge our pecuniary obligations for meat and 
clothes, we may pay rent and taxes and the ser- 
vices of all whom we employ ; but that does not 
exempt us from all indebtedness to our kind, it 
does not make us independent of our fellow-men. 
We talk of an independent fortune ; but indepen- 
dence is no gift of fortune. A man can no more 
be independent of others in that way, by favor of 
fortune, than a limb or a muscle can be indepen- 
dent of the rest of the body. In society we are 
members one of another, and every member needs 
all the rest. You may have what you call an 
independent fortune. But suppose all about you 
were as rich as yourself ? Who then would till 
your garden, harness your horses, make your gar- 
ments, cook your food ? If all were rich, none 



172 LOVE CANCELS OBLIGATION. 

would be so in the way supposed. As society 
is now constituted, your wealth may generally 
command the service of others, but it does not 
make you independent of that service. Inequal- 
ity does not cancel obligation. For suppose again 
the poor and dependent, for some reason or other, 
should refuse to render you the needful service ? 
Such cases have been, and may be again. What 
becomes of your independence then ? Is the lady 
housewife less dependent on her cook than the 
cook is" on her? Ask the housewives of your 
acquaintance, — those especially whose defective 
knowledge or defective muscle renders them inca- 
pable of performing the cook's function, — ask 
them what is their experience in that regard ? 
The rich manufacturer is sometimes deserted by 
the hands he employs ; they combine and revolt ; 
they organize what is called " a strike.'' With 
large contracts on his hands and a waiting mar- 
ket, his wheels are blocked, his spindles pause, 
his engines sleep, his business is stopped. He 
must come to terms with his operatives before his 
mill can resume its action and fulfil its purpose. 
If they depend on him for place and bread, he 
depends on them no less for what to him is dearer 
than bread, commercial position, the credit of his 
house. So far as we may judge from recent in- 
dications, from the increasing solidarity of the 



LOVE CANCELS OBLIGATION. 173 

laboring classes, and the movement known as 
labor reform, the dependence of the rich on the 
poor, of the employer on the employed, is likely 
to increase in a swifter ratio than its converse, — 
the dependence of the employed on the employer, 
of the servant on the master. 

It is in vain for any class or individual to think 
of escaping indebtedness to others. A man must 
make his lodge in the wilderness to do that even in 
a proximate degree. There are obligations which 
we cannot avoid. Who of us shall say, I owe no 
man anything ? We owe men everything. We owe 
them our position in society, which we hold by their 
permission. We owe them the protection of their 
laws, the benefit of their institutions, the results 
of their labor, the aids to improvement, the stores 
of knowledge, the wealth of thought, with which 
they have ministered and do forever minister to 
body, mind, and soul ; everything, in short, whereby 
civilized Christian man in this late time is elevated 
and blessed above the naked son of the forest who 
has nothing but the God-given earth and skies. Say 
not, imagine not, that you have paid for all this, 
that indebtedness is cancelled and obligation 
annulled by discharging the nominal pecuniary 
cost by which your share in these benefactions 
has been obtained ; that the price of living, as 
by these services you are enabled to live, has been 



174 LOVE CANCELS OBLIGATION. 

paid by you in currency or coin, or can be so 
paid ; that the thousands of dollars which you 
disburse every year makes you quits with the 
world. Owe nothing, do you say ? Paid for all ? 
You may pay your tradesman for his wares, you 
may pay your tailor for your coat, your butcher 
and your cook for your meals. But what have you 
paid Arkwright and Watt for your cotton ? What 
have you paid Kepler and Newton and Laplace 
and Bowditch for your ocean commerce ? What 
have you paid Sir Humphry Davy for your coal ? 
What have you paid Carver and Bradford and 
Winthrop for your New England heritage ? What 
have you paid George Stephenson for your rapid 
journey to New York ? What have you paid 
Franklin and Oersted and Morse for your tele- 
grams ? What have you paid Gutenberg and 
Faust for your books ? The world in which you 
live is a mass of benefactions you can never in 
that way requite, — a debt you can never dis- 
charge with money. Ages of labor and sacrifice 
have made it what it is. You cannot stir without 
encountering obligations which no conceivable 
amount of silver or gold can ever compensate. 
You send your son to college, and incur heavy 
charges for the four years' course. Do you fancy 
you pay the entire cost of his education by the 
fees of tuition and other fees you are called to 



LOVE CANCELS OBLIGATION. 175 

disburse ? Do you fancy you pay Harvard and 
Hollis and the rest for the means of instruction 
there enjoyed ? A distinction is made between 
beneficiary students and those who pay the full 
price of the course. But in fact every student 
in that university is a beneficiary; he owes his 
education to charities and gifts, — a debt whose 
amount the richest can never refund. 

And to mount from worldly and intellectual ob- 
ligations to spiritual, — from that which is least to 
that which is highest, — who shall repay the proph- 
ets and martyrs of sacred truths for the light they 
have shed on our mortal path, and for the hope of 
immortality ? Who shall satisfy the debt incurred 
by their testimonies and sacrifices, the dangers 
braved, the pains endured in the cause of mankind ? 
Who shall pay for deliverance from the bondage 
of the Church of Rome ? Who shall pay for de- 
liverance from heathen superstition, from sacrifi- 
cial burdens, for all the liberty wherewith Christ 
hath made us free ? For a being so endowed, so 
deluged with benefactions, to talk of indepen- 
dence, to boast his release from obligations to his 
kind, is monstrous ingratitude, is overweening, 
presumptuous pride. Whatever he may think, 
every son of man is a debtor to his kind for the 
larger part of all that he possesses, or can by any 
possibility acquire. A compound and accumulated 



176 LOVE CANCELS OBLIGATION. 

debt has devolved upon his head, — a debt of which 
a fraction of the interest is all that with lifelong 
effort he can hope to discharge, — a debt contracted 
in part before he saw the light, multiplied by all 
the years of childish imbecility and childish depen- 
dence, and consummated by drafts on years to 
come. Past, Present, and Future are his creditors. 
Let them make up their audit, and all that is in 
him shall not suffice to cancel the immense obliga- 
tion of life, if life be strictly reckoned on a debt- 
and-credit basis, so much rendered for so much 
received. 

It is clear that to owe no man anything is im- 
possible in the ordinary sense of obligation, im- 
possible on a market estimate of the goods of life. 
It is not in man to clear himself of the obligation 
he owes to his contemporaries even, to say nothing 
of his predecessors, if all he can give is weighed 
in market scales against all he receives. It needs 
another view than the mercantile, debt-and-credit 
theory of life and society to free us from the 
weight of obligation, the overwhelming burden of 
indebtedness, which the thoughtful and conscien- 
tious mind must feel, regarding the subject of ben- 
efits received and ability to pay in that light. 

And that other view is given in the other clause 
of the precept before us, " to love one another/' 
A society based on that principle, on mutual lov- 



LOVE CANCELS OBLIGATION. 177 

ing service, each for all and all for each ; a society 
such as Paul contemplated, such as Christianity 
would make of mankind, — would know no obliga- 
tion in the sense described. Such a society would 
be literally what the apostolic figure represents, — 
one body and many members, an organization com- 
pact as the animal frame, a union in which equality 
of interest precludes the sense of indebtedness and 
relieves the irksomeness of obligation. Suppose the 
human organism were endowed with self-conscious- 
ness in every part, — each member, each muscle, 
each organ, distinctly conscious of its place and 
function in relation to every other part and to the 
whole, would there be, do you fancy, any sense of 
indebtedness of part to part, or any superior claim 
of this over that, any feeling of obligation of the 
hand to the brain or the brain to the hand, of 
the heart to the liver or the liver to the heart ? 
Would not each be conscious as well of the neces- 
sity of all to it as of it to all ? " The eye cannot 
say to the hand, I have no need of thee;" nor 
can the most active and conspicuous member 
say to the most obscure, I have no need of you. 
u Xay, much more those members of the body 
which seem to be more feeble, are necessary." 
Now, society as the Gospel desired and designed 
it, would be essentially such an organism, so 
compact in its structure, so complete in its 

12 



178 LOVE CANCELS OBLIGATION. 

union of part with part, of each with all, so 
penetrated with one life, so divorceless and in- 
separably one. It is true, society never has been 
such, not even primitive Christian society in the 
very flush of its newness, except here and there, 
spasmodically, in single churches. But I am 
speaking now of ideals, and I say that whenever 
and so far as these ideals shall be realized, when- 
ever and so far as society shall be what Christianity 
would make it, the precept," Owe no man anything," 
will be fulfilled. Men will literally owe no man 
anything, but in mutual love will lose all feeling 
of indebtedness, all consciousness of claim on one 
side and obligation on the other. 

In every case of social union which at all ap- 
proximates to this ideal, we see this immunity 
realized. Wherever two beings are bound to each 
other by reciprocal, equal, and perfect love, all feel- 
ing of obligation or indebtedness one to the other 
ceases ; there is no question of claims or dues be- 
tween them, though all the giving, the technical, 
ostensible giving, has been confined to one side 
of the union and all the apparent receiving to 
the other. The two have given each other them- 
selves, their entire self, the uttermost that any 
can give. And that gift is so transcendent, so con- 
summate and complete as to neutralize all other 
giving, and to cancel all obligation. In a case of 



LOVE CANCELS OBLIGATION. 179 

friendship, fervent and true, between two large- 
hearted men, if one happens to be in want and 
borrows, and the other happens to abound and 
lends, although there is a technical and legal 
indebtedness of the borrower, there is no obliga- 
tion between them, or if any, it is the lender's 
quite as much as the borrower's. Does the father 
of a family in the tug and strain of his efforts to 
maintain his dependants in decency and comfort, 
dream of any other obligation than his own obli- 
gation to do just that thing? Does the thought 
of their indebtedness enter into his view of the 
relation ? Not unless he is wanting in natural 
affection. The family is one, and in the unity of 
that relation there is neither creditor nor debtor. 

Now, civil society, as I have said, is not, as at 
present subsisting, the embodiment of an equal, 
mutual, and perfect love ; it is not the exact 
counterpart of the animal organism, it is not a 
union of consenting souls, it is not one family. 
To view it as such does not make it such. Still, 
the precept holds good. To owe no man any- 
thing, we must love one another. You wish to be 
independent; all men wish it, — with right or 
wrong views, with true or false sentiment touching 
the desired good. But the thing is impossible in 
the way in which most men seek independence. 
It is impossible in the way of haughty insulation, 



180 LOVE CANCELS OBLIGATION. 

impossible in the way of self-sufficiency, of immu- 
nity from forced tasks and toil for bread, impos- 
sible in the way of wealth or social position. The 
only way to be independent is to be baptized in 
the element of love, to live in it and work in it, — 
giving yourself with good will and good works to 
your kind. On the market theory independence 
is impossible, — owing no man anything is out of 
the question ; you are under obligations, immense, 
inextinguishable. You owe a debt you can never 
discharge with money, though you coin your life 
for the purpose. 

Discard, then, the market view of life, and rise to 
the heroic. " Owe no man anything but to love," 
is the apostolic precept ; do the best you can for 
your kind, and you will owe no man anything. 
Your legal debts for market values being paid 
with their legal equivalent, the elder, larger debt 
to society, of which I spoke, can only be dis- 
charged by devotion, giving yourself with what 
of faculty there is in you to the service of your 
kind, in the way of your profession, or in whatso- 
ever way you choose to work, by living and work- 
ing in that spirit in which the great benefactors 
of humankind did their work, that is, for the 
work's sake, not anxiously considering what profit 
in the way of material gain might accrue to them 
from their labors. The great benefactors are not 



LOVE CANCELS OBLIGATION. 181 

to be paid with coin ; they can only be paid with 
gratitude and love, and an answering spirit. There 
may or may not be a nominal compensation for 
the time employed in the public service ; there 
may be awarded to them the amount of their con- 
tract ; but the thought, the genius, the patience, 
the conscientious fidelity they put into their work 
are not to be requited with gold. The Treas- 
urer of the United States could pay to George 
Washington the stipulated sum for military ser- 
vices rendered in the War of the Revolution ; but 
the United States was not rich enough then, and 
is not rich enough now, were he living, to pay in 
money what the nation owes to that man's charac- 
ter and work. The most memorable things, the 
most prized, the most fruitful of blessing, that 
brave and good men have done in their day, have 
been done without compensation. Moses received 
no pay for bringing Israel from the house of bond- 
age, nor Sakya-muni for delivering his followers 
from the yoke of caste. David received no pay for 
his Psalms, nor Isaiah for his Prophecies, nor John 
for his Gospel. Their pay is the reverent heed 
with which millions through all these centuries 
have received their word. How poor and barren 
this world would be if nothing had ever been done 
in it without stipulation ! How large a portion of 
the dearest blessings of life would be wanting to 



182 LOVE CANCELS OBLIGATION. 

us at this moment, but for those who were willing 
to spend and be spent without hope or thought of 
material reward, — those hero priests who have 
sacrificed, each in their day, at the altar of human 
weal, and the savor and fruit of whose sacrifice 
has come down to ours ! If we reckon by service 
rendered and value received, what a weight of 
obligation they have rolled on our heads, what a 
claim on posterity is theirs ! And yet the hum- 
blest individual, the most poorly endowed, in the 
most obscure corner of the earth, who lives and 
works in their spirit, who out of a good heart, 
with dutiful zeal and uncalculating love, pours 
forth his life in the service of his kind, though 
nothing comes of it that history knows and hu- 
manity celebrates, — he owes these heroes nothing ; 
their moral peer, he is quits with the foremost of 
them all. He too has loved ; he has given himself. 
Have the greatest benefactors done more ? 



XIII. 

AND WISHED FOR DAY. 

And wished for day. 

Acts xxvii. 29. 

nPHESE words are from the curious and unques- 
A tionably faithful narrative of Paul's and his 
companions' shipwreck off the island of Malta, on 
their way to Rome, whither Paul was bound as 
prisoner, on his own appeal to the imperial court. 

Apart from the high personality concerned in it, 
the narrative is markworthy as a picture of ancient 
manners, and as perhaps the best report extant of 
the state of navigation in that day. The story of 
a voyage from Ciesarea in Palestine to Puteoli in 
the Bay of Naples, in the middle of the first cen- 
tury, is a literary curiosity which, if just discovered 
in some old manuscript, would be eagerly studied 
by the learned. 

In the course of this voyage in a" ship containing 
not far from three hundred souls, when drifting 
one night before a strong gale in the sea of 



184 AND WISHED FOR DAY. 

"Adria," the voyagers found themselves rapidly- 
shoaling their water, and in imminent danger of 
running ashore on some unknown coast. In this 
emergency, we read, " they cast four anchors out 
of the stern, and wished for day." 

I well remember that when, as a child of nine 
years, I studied the Greek Testament with a ven- 
erated teacher, the late Dr. Gilman, of Charleston, 
the good man called my attention to the beautiful 
simplicity of that expression, ev^ovro rj/jbipav yeve- 
o6ai, — " they wished it would be day." The phrase 
thus impressed on the mind of the boy has often 
recurred to me in riper years, with many appli- 
cations both of its literary and its moral import. 
I have often contrasted its sublime brevity, its 
calm and continent tone, with the labored descrip- 
tions and tumid phrase of so many modern writers 
who, not content with stating the fact or the feel- 
ing they have to present, give all its reflections 
and refractions, the coloring it takes in their con- 
ception, and ransack the vocabulary for fitting 
terms by which to effect a sensation equal to the 
theme. Think how such an one would agonize in 
recounting a scene like this, — how he would di- 
late on the racking suspense, the tortures of expec- 
tation endured by that storm-tossed company 
through the weary hours of a night which threat- 
ened instant destruction, on the momentary dread 



AND WISHED FOR DAY. 185 

of the shock which should shatter the frail bark 
and engulf her devoted crew, on the angry billows 
that hungered for their prey, on the vision strained 
to catch the first glimpse of returning dawn, — 
all which the writer of the Acts conveys in the 
single phrase, " and wished for day," leaving to 
the reader's imagination to conceive what, after 
all, no language can paint, and not overwhelming 
him with a flood of words, which arrest rather than 
stimulate the action of the mind. 

Such is the rhetoric of the Acts, a book which 
recounts in a few pages some of the greatest events 
that have ever happened on this planet, and some 
of the sublimest situations ever witnessed by man. 
A severe simplicity pervades the story ; the tone is 
uniformly calm and even. There is no heat, no 
swell, no straining to place the characters and 
objects in a striking light, no aiming at effect, no 
magnifying or eulogizing of the champions of the 
gospel, no denunciation of their adversaries, no 
partisanship, no attempt to enlist the sympathy of 
the reader. The events are given without note or 
comment. There are the facts. The reflections 
you may make to suit yourself. 

To return to the phrase, " They wished for day." 
How often in human life that wish recurs, — the 
wish for day in its literal or its metaphorical sense, 
— light to the bodily eye or a day of redemption and 



186 AND WISHED FOR DAY. 

consolation to the over-burdened, suffering soul ! 
How many voyagers since Paul, in dark, tempestuous 
nights, betwixt the horrors of a raging sea and a 
lee shore, having done all that in them lay to guard 
themselves from impending danger, have sat down 
powerless, and wished for day ! How many a be- 
nighted wayfarer in lonely and uncertain paths, 
how many a weary watcher by the bed of the sick, 
how many a sentinel pacing his round benumbed 
with cold, how many a soldier left bleeding on the 
field when the battle and the day were done, how 
many a dweller amid Arctic snows, where the sun 
dips down for a night of months, has longed 
with intense desire for returning light! The 
Psalmist makes this particular longing the type 
of all intense desire, — " My soul waiteth for the 
Lord more than they that watch for the morn- 
ing ; I say, more than they that watch for the 
morning." 

The alternation of day and night is felt to be a 
merciful provision of Nature for the needs of body 
and mind. Unbroken day would dry up the spirit, 
and exhaust the energies of life. We need the 
relief of darkness and inaction. The harder the 
life, the greater that need. The child to whom life 
is a holiday regrets the setting sun ; but " a ser- 
vant," says Job, "earnestly desireth the shadow, 
and a hireling looketh for the end of his work." 






AND WISHED FOR DAY. 187 

When the night therefore fails of its legitimate 
function, when rest is denied, is become impos- 
sible, then darkness becomes an intolerable bur- 
den. And so most pathetically Job continues, 
painting for all time the sufferer's unrest : " Wea- 
risome nights are appointed to me. When ' I lie 
down, I say: When shall I arise and the night 
be gone ? I am full of tossings to and fro, unto 
the dawning of the day." 

There is a night which is not determined by 
sunrise and sunset, nor measured by watches of 
human appointment, — a night which confounds 
in one gloom the hours of sunlight with those of 
natural darkness, and often invests the former 
with a darkness deeper than Nature knows, — the 
night of sorrow. What life that reaches but half 
the accepted term has not at some time been over- 
taken with it, has not been overshadowed and 
ingulfed by it ! Who has not passed through sea- 
sons of depression and gloom, when the world 
to his vision was a hopeless blank; when the 
brightest sky was lead, and the greenest landscape 
a waste, and life a burden and disgust ; when the 
night which might bring temporary oblivion was 
better than the day, and returning day, as it called 
him back to a world of death, was new night to 
the mind ; when the sunken and submerged spirit, 
with the feeling that all the waves and billows had 



188 AND WISHED FOR DAY. 

gone over it, seemed to itself powerless to contend 
with the flood, and, with longing more intense 
than that of Paul and his companions, " driven up 
and down in Adria," wished for day ! 

That we are not to have and enjoy forever, that 
suffering is a necessary ingredient of life, is a 
lesson which cannot be learned too soon. " The 
morning cometh, and also the night." The pleas- 
ures of youth, the joy of success, the tongue of 
fame, whatever charms the senses or cheers the 
heart, is a flower whose root is ever in its grave. 
Alternate giving and taking is the course of Provi- 
dence ; alternation of joy and pain is the lot of 
man. There is no exemption from the universal 
doom. It is given to no child of man to pass 
through life unacquainted with grief. Loss and 
pain are appointed for all. There are some who 
seem to be exceptionally fortunate and blessed. 
Do not believe that they are exempt ; that the 
sufferings which do not appear do not therefore 
exist. The nearer we come to our fellow-men, 
the more we find them troubled and tried. The 
most fortunate have some private sorrows which 
ask no sympathy and know no relief, which are 
kept from the common eye like the miser's gold, 
to be told over and brooded over in lonely hours 
and secret places. 

Evil is a fixed fact; the seeds of it are sown 



AND WISHED FOR DAY. 189 

thick among all the choicest flowers of life. It 
ripens with fatal luxuriance where the smiles of 
heaven shine most benignly. It treads on the 
heels of abundance, it follows in the wake of suc- 
cess, it waits on youth and health, it is bound up 
with the choicest treasures of the heart. It comes 
in the form of disease, racking the body with aches 
and pains ; it comes in losses and reverses of for- 
tune, dissipating substance and threatening want ; 
it comes in bereavements and disappointments, in 
trials of the affections invading the family circle 
and casting us out there where we had garnered 
up our heart, where either we " must live or bear 
no life." Somehow, at some time, it inevitably 
comes. Let us try to believe that it comes with 
wise meaning and to blessed ends. Let us try to 
believe that unchanging prosperity is no more con- 
ducive to the health of the soul than unintermi-tted 
day is conducive to the health of the body. Evil 
when present seems a needless interruption of 
the peaceful flow of life, a sharp sword thrust in 
without purpose and without mercy between us 
and our joys. But let any one look back on his 
past life and see if there is one disappointment, 
one painful experience, that has not brought its 
blessing, if in no other way, by the contrast it fur- 
nished to the good which succeeded. God does 
with us as the vintner does with the overladen 



190 AND WISHED FOR DAY. 

vine ; he removes a portion of the growing fruit, 
to perfect the remainder and preserve the plant. 
" I had been ruined," said Themistocles, " had I 
not been ruined." Our happiness has its root in 
our unhappiness, and pain is the parent of joy. 
" Put this question to thyself," says a German 
moralist : " If the inscrutable Infinite, who is en- 
compassed with gleaming abysses without bounds, 
were to lay immensity open to thy view, and reveal 
himself as he distributes suns and worlds, great 
spirits and little human hearts, our days and some 
tears in them, wouldst thou rise up out of thy dust 
against him and say, ' Almighty, be other than 
thou art ' ? " In the moral creation, as in the 
natural, harmony is a resolution of discords. 
What seems harsh dissonance when heard by it- 
self has meaning and music for ear and heart 
when heard in connection with the whole. # A11 
earthly wail is a necessary stave in that eternal 
symphony in which all creatures and all worlds 
unite, and whose complex harmonies have but 
one theme, which the spirit interprets, — God is 
love. 

All this does not prevent nor greatly mitigate 
present suffering. It does not prevent evil from 
being evil at the time, nor make pain seem any- 
thing but pain. It is in vain to talk of the need 
and blessings of darkness to one who, in doubt 



AND WISHED FOR DAY. 191 

and fear and much weariness, watches for the 
light. When the night of affliction is on us, we 
chafe at the darkness and fervently wish for day. 

And day comes with its revelations and reliefs, 
its new vigor and newness of life, as the natural 
day, in due season, replaces the longest, darkest, 
heaviest night. Day came to the seamen in that 
night-foundered ship which bore the Apostle on his 
destined way. It brought deliverance to every 
soul in that company, although the ship ran 
aground and " was broken with the violence of the 
waves." It comes at length, though long delayed, 
to the ice-bound voyager in Arctic seas, whose 
eyes for months have not beheld the face of the 
sun. And the moral day, the day of consolation, of 
compensation, comes at length to all who sit in the 
shadow of affliction, to all whose hearts are dark- 
ened with grief, to all who are troubled and sorely 
tried. No man goes mourning all his days, though 
days of heaviness and wearisome nights, in the 
order of God's providence, are appointed for all. 
When a great calamity overtakes us, we think, in 
our first transport and confusion of spirit, we shall 
never be happy again, and perhaps, in our rebel- 
lious mood and strong resistance to God's chasten- 
ing, resolve that nothing shall tempt us to believe 
any more in life and joy. We embrace Grief as 
our chosen companion, and refuse to be com- 



192 AND WISHED FOR DAY. 

forted. " Sister Sorrow, sit beside me ! " But 
life and joy are strong, and life without some por- 
tion of joy cannot long subsist. The grieved and 
angered child hides his face in his hands, and 
will not look into his mother's eyes, and spurns 
her proffered caress ; but the mother, with wise 
adaptation to the childish mood, surprising his 
attention and diverting his thought from himself, 
at last prevails. The little recusant first peeps 
from his covert, then withdraws the blockade of 
the uplifted arm, and gradually surrenders and 
breaks- into smiles. So the great Mother Nature, 
or so the divine Comforter, prevails at last over 
all the obstinacy of cherished grief. Life and joy 
are strong ; consolation will gradually steal into 
the heart. " The light of smiles will beam again 
from lids that now o'erflow with tears." 

The heart is rich in resources and medicinal 
virtues and recuperative powers, and is seldom 
crushed beyond recovery while life endures. Where 
one flower withered, another springs in its place. 
When one fountain is dried up, another gushes 
and fertilizes and makes glad the heart. Cher- 
ished possessions are rent from us, but new and 
better treasures are amassed. Old comforts per- 
ish, but the Comforter is always near ; and though 
hope after hope is extinguished, hope springs eter- 
nal in the breast. We cannot wear sackcloth all 



AND WISHED FOR DAY. 193 

our years. The wished-for day of consolation 
comes to all who mourn, to all who are tried, if 
not in the way of restoration and escape, then in 
the way of resignation and the peace " that passeth 
understanding " which resignation brings. Every 
one in battling with adversity uses the means 
which Providence has placed in his power. When 
our vessel is stranded, we all seek safety in the 
way which instinct prompts, or necessity com- 
pels, or wisdom or religion dictates. Some seize a 
plank from the wreck, and endeavor to secure 
themselves with a remnant of their fortunes. 
Some join hands and find support in mutual coun- 
sel and consolation. Some beat the waves with 
desperate strength, and find forge tfulness in Ac- 
tivity. And some yield themselves up with pas- 
sive endurance, and float with face toward heaven, 
till heaven shall send them succor. The last 
method, if it does not always bring deliverance, 
will always bring peace, — the peace which springs 
from perfect trust. 

Verily, the light is sweet. There are those to 
whom the face of the natural day is denied. The 
blind behold not the pleasant light of the sun, and 
there are prisoners immured in penal cells which 
no ray from without can pierce. But the moral 
day, the day of comfort and compensation, is per- 
manently denied to none. No darkness so intense 

13 



194 AND WISHED FOR DAY. 

that it will not illumine, no wall of sorrow so thick 
through which it cannot find its way. It comes to 
all, if not from circumstance and external relief, 
then from the inner, mysterious recesses of the 
mind musing till the fire burns. It comes, — first 
the faint dawn of an uncertain, trembling hope, 
then the rosy flush of rising morn, and finally the 
perfect day. Whoever looks steadfastly within 
will find day, will find the power which is given 
to man over circumstance and all the contradic- 
tions of earth and time. There remain to all the 
satisfactions of duty. There is no situation with- 
out its duties, and no duty so humble that has not 
its reward. In the very struggle with the power 
of fevil there is a blessedness beyond the gifts of 
fortune. 

For all that live there is good in store, — no 
wound so angry or so deep, but all-healing time 
will bring its balm. Say not, I shall carry this sor- 
row to the grave, I shall never be happy more. It is 
not so written in the book of fate. From the foun- 
dation of the world, it is ordained that sorrow and 
joy shall alternate in the lot of man. Say not, 
There is no day for me ; but look up from the 
wreck of perished hopes and see to what a world 
you belong. See written upon every creation of 
God the primal gospel of love. All things exhort 
to hope ; the blue sky bends over all. Day after 



AND WISHED FOR DAY. 195 

day, the sun goes forth rejoicing and giving joy. 
Night after night, the stars look down from their 
tranquil seats and smile on man's estate. Year 
after year, the constant seasons bring their gifts. 
Nature comes and goes, and all things are full of 
beauty and blessing. Is this a world to dash 
against with our impatience and bedim with our 
tears ? Would you overcome evil and extract its 
sting, look it fairly in the face and seek to compre- 
hend it, and know that whatsoever thing you have 
seen through and thoroughly dissolved in your 
comprehension can harm you no longer. Evil is 
evil only till it is understood. Then it is lifted 
up like the serpent in the wilderness, the remem- 
brance of injury without its bitterness. 

The day of redemption comes to all. There is 
no situation in human life that can shut it out. 
Imagine a condition the most forlorn the mind 
can conceive, — the case of a prisoner immured 
for life in a solitary cell. The first feeling of one 
so doomed would be utter despair. But if life 
can withstand the pressure, if the light of the 
mind go not out in idiocy or madness, the day even 
there will dawn at last. The wretch, cut off from 
the world and all hope of redemption from without, 
would be thrown upon himself, upon the inner world 
of the mind. And there he would find what all find 
who seriously commune with their own heart, — 



196 AND WISHED FOR DAY. 

the presence of that God whom no prison can ex- 
clude, and with whom no edict can forbid commu- 
nication. And though the God so found might 
seem at first a merciless, pitiless power, seeing he 
could leave a human being so forlorn, persistent 
thought and the teachings of the spirit would cor- 
rect that judgment, would disentangle the tough 
knot of fate ; and then the presence of that sole 
companion would dispense a delicious solace, would 
people the deep solitude with holy, happy thoughts, 
would supplement the shrivelled world of the 
dungeon with his own sufficiency, would give the 
freedom which man had denied, would pierce 
the solid walls with heavenly transparencies, and 
shed exceeding day on the soul. No mischance 
can close against us the door of prayer. Wher- 
ever we may be, into whatever deepest abyss of 
sorrow we may be thrown prostrate and bleed- 
ing, it needs but an effort of thought, and we 
rest in the bosom of the Father and feel our- 
selves girt about with his protection as with a 
garment. We think of Omnipotence, and our 
weakness is made strength ; of unerring wisdom, 
and perplexity is no more ; of infinite love, and 
sorrow is blessing. 

Rightly considered, the wish for day is the deep- 
est, dearest wish of the human heart. For is not 
all that is dearest in life symbolized by it ? Day 



AND WISHED FOR DAY. 197 

is victory, day is redemption. Freedom, action, 
aspiration, growth, guidance, courage, safety, 
health, belong to the day. Limitation, bondage, 
obstruction, danger, fear, disease, are children of 
the night. The author of the Book of Revelation, 
depicting the city of God, the New Jerusalem of 
Christian expectation which he saw in his vision, 
says, u There shall be no night there." Mortal 
infirmity bound to an intermittent, spasmodic life, 
requires alternation of light with shade, — requires 
intervals of darkness, temporary oblivion, tempo- 
rary death. But the new-born spirit braced by the 
air of heaven is figured capable of eternal noon. 
Eyes without heaviness, action without weariness, 
fruition without satiety, life deepening as it flows 
into life more abundant, are supposed to be the 
habit of the heavenly world ; and that vision of 
the seer from age to age has been the mark 
and prize of Christian faith. Of life and light, 
faith fears no excess. But who can bear the 
thought of eternal night ? Who so surfeited with 
day as to face, without a pang, the idea of sink- 
ing down, down, into endless darkness and dream- 
less sleep ? To the wish for day, all hearts re- 
spond. In the universality of that wish lies a 
presage of immortality. Well, then, may our faith 
in the day be as broad as our desire ! Next to 
faith in God, no faith is more essential than faith 



198 



AND WISHED FOR DAY. 



in to-morrow, — faith that no night can ever fall 
that shall not bear a morrow in its train, that 
even the great night, which bounds our earthly- 
days itself is bounded by a morrow that is not 
of this world. 



XIV. 

ALL THINGS TO ALL MEK 

I am made all things to all men, that I might by all 
means save some. 1 Cor. ix. 22. 

"\T7ITH this phrase, Saint Paul designates a 
* policy of compromise, of concession to the 
weaknesses and prejudices of his contemporaries, 
which he saw fit to practise in the exercise of his 
mission. 

How far, for mankind in general, is such a 
policy lawful or wise ? 

Compromise in some things, to some extent, is 
unavoidable. A straight course is not always 
practicable, and, when practicable, is not always 
the best course. There are concessions which we 
have to make, whether we will or not, to obstacles 
beyond our control. In crossing a rapid stream, 
the boatman does not strike a straight line from 
shore to shore, but effects his landing by a middle 
course, conquering so much by muscular force 
and yielding so much to the sweep of the current. 



200 ALL THINGS TO ALL MEN 

So, in the world of society, we cannot always go 
straight to our mark ; we have to content our- 
selves with an indirect action. A man proposes to 
himself a certain end, in the prosecution of which 
he encounters obstacles. Opposing forces cross 
his path, and prevent him from accomplishing all 
that he designed. But he accomplishes some- 
thing, his efforts do not entirely fail ; he achieves 
at least an oblique success. 

In this sense our mortal life is a perpetual com- 
promise, the resultant of two conflicting forces, — 
our own will being one, and circumstance the 
other, — a compromise between the ideal in our 
mind and the pressure of our lot. No man's life 
is all that he aims to make it. We gain some- 
thing by our efforts, and yield something to the 
force of the stream. We describe a diagonal be- 
tween the direction of our idea and the push of the 
time. Then there are compromises of courtesy, 
concessions to custom and convention, in matters 
in which no moral principle is involved. No wise 
man will make himself conspicuous by oddities of 
dress or behavior, for the mere satisfaction of 
having his own way. No man living in society 
and keeping friendly terms with society, can in- 
dulge his private taste without limit where his 
private taste is in violent conflict with the com- 
mon use. 



ALL THINGS TO ALL MEN 201 

But now we come to compromises of another 
sort, — compromises in which men yield up their 
own convictions of truth and right to the prejudices 
of others, concessions to the errors and weaknesses 
of our fellow-men. 

This is the kind of compromise which Paul ac- 
knowledges when he says, " To the weak became I 
as weak ... I am made all things to all men." It 
is impossible not to respect the motive by which 
the Apostle was actuated in the concessions he saw 
fit to make, but it may be questioned how far the 
principle on which he acted is a safe one for us. 
And this we may be permitted to say, — contem- 
plating Paul's history from this distance of time, 
without disparagement of his inestimable ser- 
vice, — that this accommodation to the weakness 
of his countrymen is not the feature of his charac- 
ter which claims our highest regard and attracts 
us most strongly to the story of his life. It is not 
as the dexterous navigator between the jutting 
headlands and frowning incompatibilities of Jewish 
and Gentile customs, it is not as the compromiser 
between old tradition and the new creation in Jesus 
Christ, but as the conscientious and unhesitating 
champion of the truth he had once denied, as the 
never-flinching and never-wearying witness of 
Christ in the face of persecution and death, that 
we venerate that sacred memory. It is not the 



202 ALL THINGS TO ALL MEN. 

Paul who knew so well to adapt his conduct to the 
prejudices of his contemporaries, who could humor 
the weak and be all things to all men, but the 
Paul who counted all things but dross for the ex- 
cellence of the knowledge of Christ; the Paul 
who went to Damascus the scourge of the Chris- 
tians, and returned their leader, not disobedient to 
the heavenly vision ; the Paul who, in spite of 
warnings and entreaties, pressed on to Jerusalem 
to meet his doom, not counting his life dear unto 
himself, so he might finish the ministry he had 
received of the Lord Jesus, — this is the Paul 
whom we canonize in our regard. 

Paul knew very well that the ritual of the law 
must come to an end, and had already come to an 
end in principle for the followers of Jesus ; yet he 
was willing to practise it for his own part in the 
presence of those who fancied it binding. To 
those who were weak enough to be troubled by 
its neglect, he became as weak, and conformed to 
a standard other than his own. I do not presume 
to arraign the policy of Paul in so doing. Who of 
us is competent for that? Yet it has seemed to 
me, viewing the matter at this distance, that if 
Paul had continued to the last to maintain, as he 
did in his letter to the Galatians, the sufficiency 
of the gospel without the works of the law, or, 
rather, if he had uniformly exemplified that posi- 



ALL THINGS TO ALL MEN. 203 

tion in practice as he asserted it in theory ; if he 
had planted himself immovably on the Christian 
idea of a spiritual religion, where neither circum- 
cision availeth anything nor uncircumcision, and 
had said to the claims and traditions of the law : 
" Get you hence, ' beggarly elements ' ! Vanish ! 
Become extinct ! More than a thousand years we 
have had of your hard service, — a yoke which nei- 
ther our fathers were able to bear nor we ; and 
now that we have come into the liberty wherewith 
Christ hath made us free, we will be no longer 
entangled with the yoke of that bondage. See, we 
have done with you forever : " — if Paul had taken 
this stand in relation to Judaism, it has seemed to 
me that the progress of Christianity would have 
been no whit retarded in the end, while an exam- 
ple would thus have been given of inflexible resist- 
ance to spiritual bondage, which is quite as much 
needed as examples of compliance. Turn to the 
Acts of the Apostles, and see with how pathetic 
a retribution this policy of compromise miscarried 
at last to a fatal ending. It was an act of compli- 
ance, instigated by his Jewish friends on his last 
visit to Jerusalem, that proved the occasion of his 
arrest, his long captivity, and death. 

" I am made all things to all men." The world 
is indebted to Paul as to few others in its book of 
worthies. For many a strong word of divine wis- 



204 ALL THINGS TO ALL MEN. 

dom and many a brave act, we have to thank him ; 
bat this is not one of them. Apostolic authority 
was not needed to sanction a compliance to which 
human weakness so readily tends. Unhappily, no 
saying of Paul is more readily quoted than this 
confession, and no practice of Paul more often put 
forward than this accommodation. How often 
have we heard some politic person, in whom was 
no strong conviction of any moral or political truth, 
and no aim in life but personal success, whose 
chief care was to slip through the world without 
friction, without conflict of opinion, without im- 
pinging on any man's prejudices, — some bland 
companion who always consents and concedes, is 
always of the same way of thinking as those he 
converses with, and has no negative in his mental 
repertory, — how often have we heard such an one, 
with spirit and purpose as far from Paul's as the 
children of this world from the children of light, 
quote Paul's authority for being all things to all 
men, and really seem to take credit to himself for 
this oily accommodation, as if it were some ex- 
quisite grace by virtue of which he had come to 
stand in apostolic succession! 

It needs no apostle to teach accommodation. 
Non-conformity is not the vice of society. It is 
the vice of here and there a churl, whose angu- 
lar nature refuses to adjust itself with any other 



ALL THINGS TO ALL MEN. 205 

nature, or any usage or convention, but rubs 
and grinds in all its intercourse with the world. 
Some impracticable recusants there are, whose 
ungracious temper bristles with objections, and 
can only exist in an atmosphere of hostility. But 
it is not the vice of society. It is not smoothness 
that society lacks, — smooth enough already for 
the moral health of those who compose it, — not 
smoothness, but conscience, conviction, sincerity. 

It sounds wise and humane to talk of being all 
things to all men, after the example of Saint Paul. 
But see if you have the same motive which Paul 
had in his concessions. Is it that you may win 
men to the truth and their own eternal good ? Or 
is it that you may win them for yourself, and make 
them auxiliary to your success ? Is it that you 
may be useful to your fellow-men or only that you 
may be popular ? It is easy to be all things to 
all men for one who has no strong convictions and 
no fixed principles of his own. But what does it 
amount to, — this universal complaisance, — and 
what is the end of it ? It ends in being nothing 
to any man ; in representing no truth, no principle, 
no fact, nothing that any one can grasp and lay 
hold of, and feel that he has hold of something 
substantial. It ends in being a nonentity, so far as 
any fixed position or personal influence is con- 
cerned, — not a man standing upon two feet and 



206 ALL THINGS TO ALL MEN. 

filling so much space, be it more or less, with 
solid substance, but an apparition, a thing without 
a backbone, which a man can pass his hand through 
and feel no resistance. Your business is not to be 
all things to all men, but to be something to some- 
body, — to stand for something definite, to repre- 
sent some idea or principle, so that men may count 
upon you in that one thing, and set you down good 
for so much. " He who does not withstand," says 
Coleridge, " has no standing place." 

Compliance is amiable, it makes social inter- 
course easy ; but non-compliance, harsh and 
crabbed though it seem, would often be healthier 
for your brother and you, — healthier for your 
brother, for men are not served by humoring their 
weaknesses and prejudices. We make them no 
stronger by so doing. We do not take their weak- 
nesses and prejudices out of them, and put health 
and reason into them. We rather confirm them in 
their prepossessions. It may be that these are the 
very things in their mental condition which most 
need to be cast out of them, and which unless they 
are rid of they can never reach their full stature 
and occupy their talents with the best effect. It 
may be that what they most need is to encounter 
opposition, to have their prejudices shocked, to 
experience a revulsion, to be arrested in their 
humdrum, traditionary, taking-for-granted way of 



ALL THINGS TO ALL MEN. 207 

looking at things, to be set a-thinking, if haply a 
new vision of spiritual verities may dawn on their 
souls. 

Healthier for ourselves is non-conformity with 
views we do not approve. It was possible for Paul 
to become as weak to the weak without sacrificing 
anything of his manhood thereby. But it needs 
the strength of Paul to practise this conception 
without being harmed by it. The danger is that, 
in making ourselves weak to them that are weak 
for a given exigency, we stay weak when the 
exigency is past. 

Paul practised on a certain occasion a rite which 
he did not regard as binding, " because," as we 
read, " of the Jews which were in those quarters." 
But, for us, I think we do not wisely when we act 
contrary to our own views, " because of the Jews 
which are in those quarters," — for fear, that is, of 
what may be thought of us by those who are not 
of our party or sect. There are always " Jews in 
those quarters," when men are disposed to seek 
their rule of action out of themselves ; and if once 
we set ourselves to square our conduct with a for- 
eign standard, we shall make but little progress in 
any mission of our own. Twist not your lips to 
catch the charm of a strange shibboleth, however 
it may charm in others. 

To this effect, I read the example and the life of 



208 ALL THINGS TO ALL MEN. 

Christ. And when, in view of a timid and accom- 
modating policy, I wish to refresh my faith in a 
contrary course, I bring before me the example of 
the Master. I call to mind how he, so meek and 
gentle, refused to comply with the rules and tradi- 
tions of the elders when they clashed with his own 
conceptions of truth and right ; and how, with no 
human authority to back him, he drove the plough- 
share of his word right through the conventions of 
his time, and made him a straight furrow in a 
crooked and evil world. Pure and devout as no 
other before or since, he incurred the reproach of 
being a Sabbath-breaker, a friend of wine-bibbers 
and sinners. Said one of his disciples, " Knowest 
thou that the Pharisees were offended after they 
heard this saying ? " The answer was, " Every 
plant which my Heavenly Father hath not planted 
shall be rooted up." 

Among the minor martyrdoms which he must 
be prepared to undergo who means to be true to 
his own convictions, to follow his own idea, is the 
pain of being misunderstood and misjudged, looked 
upon with suspicion and mistrust by those whom 
he respects, whose good opinion he most values. 
Nowhere is this martyrdom, the penalty of moral 
independence, more likely to be incurred than in 
this boasted land of liberty, where deference to 
opinion, social, political, ecclesiastical, imposes a 



ALL THINGS TO ALL MEN. 209 

restraint as real as the constitutional forms of 
oppression and suppression in other lands, and 
where Siberias of informal banishment — what we 
call " left out in the cold " — await the dissenter 
from the platform of his party or sect. 

Not to be as weak to the weak and all things to 
all men, but to be strong, if possible, in the inde- 
pendent exercise of our own judgment, in the 
power to obey our own vision ; not afraid to call 
our souls our own, and to exercise the right of 
property in them, — is the rule, not only of self- 
respect, but of final success. 

I have all along supposed that we act conscien- 
tiously, that we follow the law of right as it is 
written in our hearts. If any one thinks to draw 
from this doctrine a license to follow a lawless 
impulse, regardless of right or wrong ; if any one 
uses it as a dispensation to affront the wholesome 
uses of society for the sake of contradiction or self- 
ish ease, — he perverts it to his own damnation. 
My doctrine is not that a man be wilful, but self- 
governed ; not that he be singular, but that he 
judge for himself what is right. If the wrong way 
is none the less wrong, so, too, the right way is 
none the less right, because many walk in it. If 
we may not follow the multitude to do evil, there 
is no reason why we should not keep them company 
in doing good. We will rejoice in their fellowship 

14 



210 ALL THINGS TO ALL MEN 

so long as we can walk together with safety to 
ourselves ; and when our ways divide, we will 
part company in peace. The world is wide ; and 
many thousand are the paths that track its spread- 
ing plains and bridge its huge chasms and tunnel 
its everlasting hills, all worn smooth by custom, 
trodden, beaten, paved, and shining. But in the 
moral world only one path, and it may be a path 
that is yet to be made, can ever lead us to light 
and peace. 

Ah ! grant me, Spirit of Truth, to find that way, 
and to know that I have found it ; and I will walk 
in it, trusting and rejoicing, though I walk alone, 
knowing that I am not alone, because the Father is 
with me. 



XV. 

STEENGTH IN WEAKNESS. 

For when I am weak, then am I strong, 

2 Cor. xii. 10. 

"PAUL spoke from the depths of his private ex- 
perience when he said this ; but this personal 
experience of his is a universal experience, or ex- 
presses a truth of universal application. 

A "thorn in the flesh," some bodily infirmity, 
or it may be some temptation, the true nature of 
which it is impossible to determine, was given 
him lest he " should be exalted above measure." 
He besought that it might be taken from him, 
but was comforted with the assurance that the 
power of Christ — that is, the power of the spirit, 
the highest moral power — was perfected, dis- 
played to perfection in that very weakness. " Most 
gladly, therefore," he said, " will I rather glory 
in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may 
rest upon me. Therefore I take pleasure in infir- 
mities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecu- 
tions, in distresses for Christ's sake: for when I 
am weak, then am I strong." 



212 STRENGTH IN WEAKNESS. 

Certainly, if ever man deserved to be called 
strong in his own might, in the indomitable force 
of his own character and will, it was Paul, — a 
man of unquestionable power, and a very rare kind 
of power, and one which in its kind has never been 
surpassed ; a man to whose insight and energy 
and toil and self-sacrificing spirit the establish- 
ment and promulgation of Christianity, as we un- 
derstand it, is mainly due, and without whose 
efforts, so far as we can see, the confession of 
Christ would have been nothing more than a spe- 
cies of Judaism, and as such, would have perished 
with the dissolution of the Jewish State. See 
what a different thing Christianity becomes the 
moment Paul takes it in hand, — how from a local, 
sectarian creed it becomes a universal, cosmopoli- 
tan faith, ample as the heavens, and like them em- 
bracing all tongues and climes in its world-wide 
scope ! See with what prophetic daring he bursts 
the bands of the Past and the miserable confine- 
ment of Judaism which were choking the infant 
Word, and leads it forth from the walls of Jeru- 
salem into the world's broad day to shine equally 
like that for Jew and Gentile, bond and free. 
Divest him of those sacred associations which the 
Christian Church connects with his name, judge 
him by the standard of pure humanity, and Paul 
must be acknowledged to be one of the strongest 
of the sons of men. 



STRENGTH IN WEAKNESS. 213 

He does not affect to disclaim the service he had 
rendered to the Christian cause by his efforts ; he 
is deeply conscious of the worth of his work. " I 
labored," he says, " more abundantly than they 
all." But he makes less account of his active 
efforts, of the strength displayed in his activities, 
than he does of that passive and divine strength 
which was manifest in his trials and sufferings. 
He felt that the power which works in us to will 
and to do in our activity may be even more sig- 
nally shown in our passive states, — made apparent 
to the world in our power of endurance, or re- 
vealed to ourselves in those internal experiences 
of which the world knows nothing, but which nev- 
ertheless constitute the more important part of 
our life. 

There are seasons of infirmity which happen to 
all ; there are passages of suffering in every life, — 
they may be of the body or they may be of the 
mind, they may spring from outward pressure or 
internal defect, — which furnish the topics and 
occasion of a strength unwitnessed in action, and 
which action alone can never impart. How great 
and glorious soever the strength exerted in action 
by the able and the strong, a more impressive, 
more effective and divine strength is that which 
is sometimes manifest in weakness, in depression, 
and suffering. The apostolic paradox is as true 



214 STRENGTH IN WEAKNESS. 

of all the truly great and good as it was of Paul, 
— when they were weak, they were strong, I know 
of no higher test of greatness than this, no better 
criterion by which to discriminate the true from 
the false. 

To this class of strengths which are perfected 
in weakness, belongs pre-eminently the strength of 
the martyr, — the strength developed in noble na- 
tures by persecution and suffering. This martyr- 
power is specifically the mightiest agent that has 
ever wrought in human affairs. It is the prime 
condition of the moral world. All civilization is 
founded upon it. Every step in the progress of 
society is based on martyrdom of one or another 
kind and degree. For when was there ever a new 
truth proposed, or a new impulse given to society, 
that did not provoke persecution. And the im- 
pulse given, and the good gained, has generally 
been proportioned to the suffering endured in its 
behalf. We need not look far for illustration. 
Our own New England, so favored in all social 
and moral advantages, rich beyond most parts of 
the earth in all that is most essential to human 
well being, is the fruit of martyrdom, — a fruit 
whose seed was sown in weakness and want and 
hardship and death, to be raised in power and 
glory, — the fruit of the persecuted Puritans, in 
whom a divine strength of the spirit was perfected 



STRENGTH IN WEAKNESS. 215 

in civil and material weakness. We are living on 
their sorrows, we are nourished by their blood. 
Universal Christendom, with all the unspeakable 
and incalculable blessings which connect them- 
selves with the Christian faith, is the product of 
martyr lives and deaths. Planted in weakness, 
and watered with tears and blood from age to age, 
it has grown to be the strength and hope of the 
world. To trace the progress of Christian truth 
is to call up before us an interminable series of 
brave and patient spirits who have offered up their 
lives in its service. Each individual in that sacred 
host wrought well in his place and was strong in 
action; for the power to bear implies the power 
to act, as the greater implies the less. But their 
greatest strength, that by which they have become 
the leaders and saviors of the world, was born of 
weakness and perfected through suffering, — the 
strength of the tried and the persecuted. As the 
highest instance in this kind, the Church adores 
the Leader of that band, — the divine man in 
whom this strength was supreme. In the life of 
Christ are recorded many wonderful works, mira- 
cles of beneficent action, words and deeds of im- 
mortal power and worth ; but where does the 
Christ appear most divinely great and strong ? 
In what phase and attitude of his life does he 
put forth the greatest effect? What passage in 



216 STRENGTH IN WEAKNESS. 

his history has contributed most to bless and re- 
deem the world ? Is it when discoursing on the 
mountain, or healing the sick, or opening the eyes 
of the blind? The unanimous voice of the Chris- 
tian world declares that the Christ was greatest 
and strongest when all power seemed to have 
departed from him ; when, helpless on the cross, 
he suffered the will of his Father and the power 
of his enemies. It is the crucified Christ that 
exhibits most clearly the divine. It is the cru- 
cified Christ that discloses the wondrous deeps 
of the spirit, that draws all men after him, and 
fills the world with his matchless idea and his 
saving love. 

There are crosses in every lot, and those crosses 
are or may be the occasion and condition of a 
power more effective for the good of others and 
our own than any we have exerted in action. 

I say for the good of others. We often contri- 
bute most effectually to the good of others when 
we seem incapable of contributing anything, wdien 
we require aid and support ourselves, and are not 
in a condition to give. It is not those who do the 
most, or not necessarily they, who accomplish the 
most. If we look around us, if we study our- 
selves, we shall find that we are as much indebted 
to the sufferings of our fellow-men as we are to 
their action. Indeed, if we inquire what it is that 



STRENGTH IN WEAKNESS. 217 

has done the good which is supposed to have been 
done by those who have labored most devotedly 
and most effectively for human weal, we shall find 
that it is not so much the acts performed and the 
works completed, as it is the spirit which was man- 
ifested in them. And that spirit may be mani- 
fested in suffering as well as in doing. The spirit 
that is in us outlives all our works ; it is that alone 
which gives them any real value and lasting effect ; 
it is that alone which tells in the sum of things. 
The life of many a renowned person, the record 
of whose action fills large volumes, has left no 
permanent trace and effected no permanent good, 
because the true spirit was not there to quicken 
and bless. The life of Christ is contained in a 
few pages, may be read in a couple of hours, but 
what length of time can ever efface the stamp of 
his spirit from the world ? 

I said we may contribute most effectually to the 
good of others when we seem incapable of contri- 
buting anything. Let me take you to the sick- 
room of some poor invalid, who for the greater 
part of his life has been confined within the four 
walls of his chamber and for many years has been 
unable to employ his hands in any useful work. 
A shallow utilitarian would say that an individual 
in that condition is a very useless being, and that 
such a life is no benefit, but a burden, to society. 



218 STRENGTH IN WEAKNESS. 

It may be so in some cases, but more often, 
I believe, if such things could be weighed and 
measured, that passive invalid would be found 
to have contributed more abundantly and more 
lastingly to the good of his fellow-creatures than 
many a one who toils unceasingly at his daily 
task, and who never through illness has lost a 
day's work. He has taught without intending, 
without knowing it perhaps, to some bystander or 
attendant a more important lesson; by the seed 
he has unwittingly dropped in some receptive mind 
or heart, he has wrought a more beneficent work 
than others have done by the action of a whole life. 
And so he has been stronger in his weakness than 
the strong man in his strength. I will suppose 
that he has quickened but one soul and sent it for- 
ward with new impulse in the path of life, and I 
will suppose anotner to have labored without ceas- 
ing, to have amassed a large estate, and never per- 
haps to have committed a crime, but to have lived 
and labored always in a mean and selfish spirit, 
without reverence and without love ; and I say 
that the good done to that one soul in the former 
case outweighs all that has been accomplished in 
the other by a whole life of what is commonly 
called useful toil. The world is very much in the 
dark as to what is useful, or often greatly mis- 
taken in its standard and measure of utility. If 



STRENGTH IN WEAKNESS. 219 

we leave out of view the moral in man, if we leave 
out the fact of spirit in our estimate of things, why- 
then a bale of cotton or a shipload of iron is worth 
more than the noblest act or life which yields 
no material product, then the invention of the 
steam-engine is incomparably a more useful gift 
to the world than the gospel of Christ. But trace 
those material products and agents to their last 
use, and you will see that they are useful only so 
far as they promote human well-being. What- 
ever promotes human well-being is the true util- 
ity. The agent most conducive to that result 
is the education and perfection of the moral na- 
ture. One pure example, one noble life, is worth 
more than all the material agencies at work, or 
that ever have been at work, in the world. I tell 
you, if there be in this community one really good 
man or woman, and but one, that individual, 
though it should be the humblest citizen among 
us, is a greater good to this community, and is 
doing more good every day than all its industry 
and its traffic and all the hands it employs. The 
formation of the moral character is a work of more 
real importance than the whole business so called 
of this community, of this nation, than the whole 
material universe apart from its bearing on the 
moral life. The formation of the character is the 
real business of this world ; and all the other busi- 



220 STRENGTH IN WEAKNESS. 

ness that is done in the world, the buying and the 
selling and the making, is of no importance except 
as in its final bearing and result it promotes that 
work. The material universe has no significance 
and no true being except as the topic, means, and 
arena of that work. The material universe exists 
only as the ground and topic of the moral. 

If our weakness, as we have seen, may be made 
strength and good to others, how much more to 
ourselves ! Who has not experienced at times that 
weakness which underlies our ordinary powers, — 
the superficial every-day strength that just suffi- 
ces for every-day tasks ! It is as if the coat of 
mail in which we had been fighting the life-battle 
were stripped off and we were left powerless and 
defenceless without it. You are stricken with ad- 
versity, you are made weak with affliction, — bodily 
disease or the loss of your dearest. Disqualified 
for labor, indisposed to exertion, you feel as if all 
strength and virtue had gone out of you. In the 
dull prostration and cheerless night of that expe- 
rience a strength is springing up in you which as 
yet you know not of, and which you had never 
found in action. The upper layer of superficial 
strength has been removed from your life and a 
stratum of weakness succeeds ; but underneath 
that weakness a more exceeding strength appears, 
— the primary formation of the soul. Like the 



STRENGTH IN WEAKNESS. 221 

fabled Titan, whose strength was renewed by 
touching the ground, man needs to be thrown 
back from time to time on the native soil of his 
own breast. The night has come, and you sink 
down worn and weary ; but the night which pros- 
trates for a while, invigorates in the end. You 
needed this experience to make you acquainted 
with yourself, to give you new sight of your means 
and aims. In that new discernment there lies 
already a new power ; and now that you are weak 
you are strong, — strong with new insight and 
strong with new hope. And if the lesson of that 
time has not been lost upon you, when you rise 
from your temporary prostration you will go forth 
with new vigor to new and better works. 

Or again, you are stricken in your conscience, 
you are convicted in your soul of grievous wrong ; 
you have sinned against the incorruptible judge 
within. You are weak in the consciousness of 
having fallen from truth and duty. The season 
of contrition is also a season of power. You see 
now how hollow and without foundation was the 
fancied strength which you had before you fell. 
A breath has overthrown it. It needed this fall 
to discover you to yourself, to teach you your im- 
potence, and to lay anew the foundation of obe- 
dience in the soul. When you thought you were 
strong you were weak ; now that you know your 



222 STRENGTH IN WEAKNESS. 

weakness you are strong. We must learn to think 
humbly of ourselves before the Divine strength can 
be perfected in us. There is a truth in the old 
saying, that we are nearer to God when we have 
sinned, for then God is revealed to us anew in his 
law. And after all, it is not by our works that we 
are saved. " God needeth no man's goods ; " * we 
are saved by faith. 

The result of the whole is the old secret which 
the heart long since whispered to itself, that God 
alone is strong. There is no strength but his; 
we are strong only as we come into his order and 
are filled with his life and moved by his Spirit. 
All the truly great and good have felt this, have 
expressed it. " Not unto us, Lord, not unto us, 
but unto thy name give glory," has been their con- 
fession and their triumph when they have acted 
wisely and well. They felt themselves possessed 
by a higher power. " Not I, but the grace of God 
which was with me," said Paul. "I can of mine 
own self do nothing," was the word of Christ. 

So let us learn to think little of our action when 
we have seemed to do best, yet work as we can in 
our place and calling, — work as talent and oppor- 
tunity are given us. Our work is nothing in itself; 
but if the Spirit of God be in it and in us, that 
Spirit will bear fruit in its season. And when we 

* Non eget bonis tuis. — Saint Bernard. 



STRENGTH IN WEAKNESS. 223 

are weak and helpless and suffering, let us not 
feel that we are forsaken ; let us not feel that we 
are emptied of God ; rather that we are emptied of 
our own imagined strength, and that God is flow- 
ing in to fill up the void in the breast. Let us 
look that his strength be perfected in our weak- 
ness, knowing that the deeper the abasement the 
greater the exaltation, and that when we are weak 
we are strong. 



XVI. 

SPIRITS IN PEISON. 

By which also he went and preached unto the spirits 
in prison. 1 Peter iii. 19. 

* I ^HE " Apostles' Creed," an ancient symbol, 
though not a document actually emanating 
from the hands of the Apostles, contains the note- 
worthy article at which modern theology somewhat 
hesitates, — that Christ after death descended into 
hell, that is, the place of departed souls. The 
dead were supposed by the ancients — Jews as 
well as Gentiles — to have their abode in a region 
in the hollow of the earth inaccessible to the light 
of day. This hold was called a "prison," and 
rightly so ; for those who were in it, both good and 
bad, were supposed to be detained there against 
their will. They sighed in vain for the upper 
world from which they had descended, and to 
which it was impossible evermore to return. A 
dismal idea those ancients had of the future state. 
It was a melancholy life which they pictured to 
themselves, — the life of the departed, — compared 



SPIRITS IN PRISON. 225 

with the life in the flesh. Even in Elysium, in 
Valhalla, in Abraham's bosom, the future state to 
them was loss, not gain ; not enlargement, but con- 
finement more close than before. The departed, 
in their conception, were less alive than when 
clothed with earthly bodies, instead of more alive 
as we conceive them. They went down into that 
underworld, and there they were forced to remain. 
If not tormented, they were held in durance. They 
would gladly have returned to this world's light. 
Elysium was no compensation for the loss of the 
earthly life. They were " spirits in prison." Ho- 
mer represents Achilles in Elysium as saying he 
would rather be a day-laborer on the earth than 
king of all the dead. It is necessary to under- 
stand these ancient views of the future state in 
order to appreciate the full blessing of the Chris- 
tian revelation in this particular. So true it is 
that Christ " brought life and immortality to light," 
that he " burst the bonds of death " and " led cap- 
tivity captive." This deliverance is figured in that 
beautiful fancy of young Christendom, that Jesus 
after death, before his ascension into heaven, de- 
scended into hell, or, as our text has it, went and 
preached to the spirits in prison ; that he gave to 
the dead also his divine gospel, — preached in the 
underworld, as he had done in the upper, — salva- 
tion and the kingdom of heaven. 

15 



226 SPIRITS IN PRISON. 

Such was the belief of the early Church, very 
faintly intimated in the New Testament, — the only 
distinct allusion to it being the passage I have 
quoted, — but made an article of faith in the Apos- 
tles' Creed, and dramatically set forth in the apoc- 
ryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, which probably repre- 
sents the current belief of the Christians of the 
second century. 

It is not my intent, however, to discuss the 
doctrine of Christ's descent into hell. I have 
nothing more at present to say on that topic, 
but I seize on that expression, " spirits in prison." 
It is very suggestive. The spirits of the under- 
world are not the only ones included in that 
category ; the upper world, the living human 
world of our experience, is full of them. They 
are all about us, and we perhaps are of the num- 
ber. Spirits in prison, — I scarcely know of any 
other. Where shall we look for spirits out of 
prison, for spirits wholly free ? What spirit but 
in some way is fettered and trammelled and dis- 
qualified for being and doing all that a spirit might 
and should be and do. We call ours a free coun- 
try. We have no hereditary sovereign over us; 
we choose our own rulers and make our own laws. 
We think that a great privilege ; a good deal of 
rhetoric is annually expended in celebrating it. 
But I am not aware that spirits are more free in 



SPIRITS IN PRISON. 227 

these States than in other countries equally en- 
lightened. I have sometimes been tempted to think 
they are less so, — that public opinion, fashion, 
caste, the fear of what people will say, are more 
imperious and binding here than in other lands. 
Be that as it may, it is certain that political liberty 
does not necessarily lead to spiritual emancipa- 
tion, does not take out of prison the spirits of those 
who enjoy it. It rather establishes and tightens 
one of the prisons in which spirits are confined, 

— the prison of party. The American politician 
is constrained to become a member of a party ; 
he must act with his party to act with political 
effect. But the party inevitably becomes a prison 
in time to those who act with it. It shuts them 
up to certain prescribed methods ; it limits their 
judgment of men and things. When I see a man 
sacrificing his private convictions, however judi- 
ciously, heroically, to the party he serves, assent- 
ing to measures whose wisdom he questions, voting 
for the candidate whose fitness he doubts, or re- 
fusing to vote for the candidate of another party 
whose qualifications he approves, I acknowledge, 
it may be, in such action a political necessity, but 
I certainly recognize in the actor a spirit in prison, 

— a spirit trammelled by expediency, cramped by 
association, — a spirit that cannot do the best that 
it sees, that cannot square its action with its vision. 



228 SPIRITS IN PRISON. 

Aside from politics there are social connections 
that hold us all in iron bonds. No man belongs 
entirely to himself, and no man is quite original. 
Our profession, our age, the community in which 
we live, exert an inevitable influence over us. 
They form a constituent part of our being ; our 
opinions, sentiments, principles, habits are given 
us by the atmosphere in which we live. We in- 
hale them, we absorb them, they are in our diet 
and in our blood. Our Christianity, our Protes- 
tantism in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, is 
not the result of investigation, but the accident of 
birth. It is a part of our heritage, a part of our 
constitution. No man so insulated or so original, 
who is not to some extent the product of society. 
No doubt we are helped by these connections. 
On the whole, we are more helped than hindered 
by them. But some impediments and bonds they 
inevitably lay upon us. They forestall our judg- 
ment in many things. There is a prison of preju- 
dice more or less close around each of us. The 
light of truth does not come to us straight from 
the fountain, in full and unembarrassed effusion, 
but deflected, refracted, colored, through the me- 
dium of our position and our time. Lord Bacon 
was a zealous reformer of the methods of science, 
but he could not quite disengage himself from the 
prepossessions of his age. In direct contradiction 



SPIRITS IN PRISON. 229 

of his own fundamental principle he rejected the 
Copernican astronomy as a visionary hypothesis, 
and held fast to the old belief that the sun re- 
volves and the earth stands still. Luther was a 
zealous reformer in religion, he gave up papal 
infallibility, he thundered against indulgences, he 
renounced purgatory, renounced the Mass, dealt 
very freely with the Fathers and the New Testa- 
ment, but he clung to the Devil, — a belief one 
would say to be got rid of if possible ; but he clung 
to it. Next to Christ, the Devil was the foremost 
article in his creed. Sir Thomas More was one of 
the bravest, most independent and intelligent men 
in English history. Contemporary with Erasmus 
and Luther, he knew their views ; but, as Lord 
Macaulay says of him, he was ready to die for the 
truth of the dogma of Transubstantiation, — the ex- 
treme and most questionable point of Romish doc- 
trine. Sir Matthew Hale was wise and conscientious 
and merciful and just, and one of the most intelli- 
gent men of his time ; but he did not scruple to hang 
women for witchcraft, declaring that the reality of 
the thing was unquestionable, — for, first, "the Scrip- 
tures had affirmed it ; and secondly, the wisdom 
of all nations had provided laws against it." Sir 
Thomas Browne, an enlightened philosopher and 
distinguished physician, whose medical studies one 
would think might have taught him better ; and 



230 SPIRITS IN PRISON, 

Cudworth, author of the " Intellectual System," — 
adhered to the same faith. 

Here are cases of brave spirits and true, among 
the most enlightened the world has known, who 
yet must be classed as spirits in prison, hopelessly, 
irretrievably fixed, incarcerated, immured, in the 
prejudices of their time. 

Such examples may well give us pause. How 
do we know that the great authorities of the pres- 
ent day, the teachers on whom we chiefly rely, to 
whom we listen with the greatest confidence, — 
how do we know that they and we ourselves are 
not shut up and fast locked in some opinion or 
belief as baseless as the doctrine of witchcraft or 
the dreams of alchemy ? Prejudice is not all on 
the side of belief. There is a prison of unbelief 
not less tenacious. Let us not for a moment ima- 
gine that confinement and limitation are the pro- 
duct of creeds, are proper to conservatism, and 
unexampled beyond the conservative pale. I have 
known radicals so called whose prison, though 
new, was as narrow, the walls of it as thick, and 
the bars as close as those of any time-gray and 
weather-rusted stronghold of conservatism. Here 
is a radical in social reform. He bears on his 
heart the wrongs and woes of society ; he burns 
and strives to have them abolished, — all vice and 
evil at once and forever he would do away, — not 



SPIRITS IN PRISON. 231 

by moral influence and gradual growth of the 
good, but by mechanical force. He insists on im- 
practicable measures, and thinks to establish vir- 
tue by dint of stringent legislation. In short, he 
is an absolutist in morals ; and absolutism is a very 
close prison to the spirit possessed by it. Here is 
a radical in speculation, a despiser of traditions, 
a come-outer. The past is nothing to him, author- 
ity is nothing, he is bound by no forms. Here 
surely is a spirit out of prison. If absence of 
any positive belief constitutes an emancipated 
spirit, he may claim that distinction. But when I 
listen to his discourse I perceive that negations 
may create as close a confinement around a man 
as affirmations. This man is so shut up in his 
theory of the uniformity of natural events, of the 
impossibility of anything out of the common, of the 
impossibility of any existence of which Science 
furnishes no proof, — he has built around him, with 
this theory, such a thick wall of negation as to ren- 
der himself inaccessible to any spiritual illumina- 
tion, to any influx of knowledge through other 
avenues than those which it pleases him to keep 
open. One half of the life and experience of man 
is closed to him by the wilful assumption of its 
nullity in which he immures himself. There is no 
window in his prison which opens on that side. 
He passes for a very enlightened and free spirit ; 



232 SPIRITS IN PRISON. 

he seems to me narrow and bound. I see the 
truth there is in his negations. I desire to see it, 
I respect it. He does not try to see the truth there 
is in my beliefs ; he does not care to see it, he is 
blind on that side. Such is my experience of the 
limitations of even the gifted and the good. In 
my intercourse" with men I have found that the 
two rarest qualities in human nature are liberality 
and justice. Genius is rare and holiness is rare; 
but show me a thoroughly liberal and fair mind, 
and I will show you a spirit intellectually as nearly 
out of prison as any spirit in human flesh may 
hope to be. 

I say intellectually ; but the prisons in which 
men's prejudices immure them have often a moral 
ground, — dislike of those who differ from us, con- 
tempt for those whom we regard as inferior, impa- 
tience of opposition, hatred, and ill will. Every 
passion which men indulge is a prison to the soul 
possessed by it, and the deadliest prisons in which 
spirits languish are those which we build for our- 
selves by our faults and crimes. Whoso commit- 
teth sin is the slave of sin. A sinful habit grown 
into the life, — what a bondage is that, and how 
fast it grows ! Our natures are so constituted as 
strongly to incline in a given direction, to do per- 
force what we have often done before. Our actions 
grow to habits as easily and imperceptibly as 



SPIRITS IN PRISON. 233 

youth shoots up into manhood, or manhood de- 
clines into age. Then comes the experience of 
that law of which Paul speaks, which compels a 
man to do what he hates. The very hatred shows 
the strength of the prison in which the spirit 
pines. The spirit does not will to sin, the spirit 
yearns to the moral law, it thirsts after righteous- 
ness ; and still the old complaint, " When I would 
do good, evil is present with me. For I delight in 
the law of God after the inward man : but I 
see another law in my members . . . bringing me 
into captivity to the law of sin. ... wretched 
man that I am ! who shall deliver me from the 
body of this death ? " Happy they, if any there 
be, who know nothing of this conflict, to whom 
all this is a foreign tale, like a story of ro- 
mance or high-wrought tragedy, who experience 
no contradiction in themselves, no obstruction in 
their will, and none in their members, that hin- 
ders obedience to the highest law their minds 
have sight of ; with whom the law in the members 
is one with the law in the mind ; with whom to 
see is to will, and to will is to perform. Wherever 
this perfect obedience is found, there is Christ 
preaching to the spirits in prison and aiding their 
deliverance. We are all spirits in prison, more 
or less bound by accidents of time and place, by 
our connections and prepossessions, by our preju- 



234 SPIRITS IN PRISON. 

dices and passions, our infirmities and sins. The 
flesh itself becomes a prison when it ceases to 
answer the demands of the spirit. And there 
comes a time to most when the spirit calls on the 
flesh in vain, when sickness and infirmity lay hold 
of us, and we " groan within ourselves, waiting for 
the adoption, to wit, redemption of our body." 
Spirits in prison, let us learn to be very patient 
with our brother and sister captives in their sev- 
eral cells, patient of one another's bonds and limi- 
tations, not too confident of our own emancipation, 
but hoping for the time when the Father-Spirit, 
that preaches to us continually if we will but hear 
his voice, shall deliver us all into " the glorious 
liberty of the children of God." 



XVII. 

THE SPIEIT'S KEST. 

Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, 
and I ivill give you rest. Matthew xi. 28. 

'T^HE sublime self-assertion expressed in these 
words is peculiar to Jesus among the teach- 
ers of men. What other teachers affirm of their 
doctrine he affirms of himself. Other teachers 
have propounded their views as the truth of God ; 
he declares himself the Truth and the Life. Other 
teachers have vaunted the peace which their sys- 
tems afford ; he offers himself as rest to the soul. 

A true religion fulfils the double office of stimulus 
and rest, — incentive to action and relief from the 
pressure of cares and pains. The soul needs both 
in varying measure, according to its state and mood. 
When life flourishes, — when peace and prosper- 
ity, health of body and health of mind, domes- 
tic comforts and social satisfactions, abound and 
shed their light about us, — when pursuits that 
interest us absorb our thought, and the current 
of our life flows smoothly in its providential chan- 



236 THE SPIRITS REST. 

nel, — we need instruction, warning, it may be 
reproof. When, on the other hand, weakness, in- 
capacity, pains of body or pains of mind, losses, and 
afflictions interrupt the calm flow ; when perplex- 
ity and tribulation break up our rest, and breed 
storms in our sky, and wrap us in deep shadow, 
we crave the supports of the immortal Comforter, 
we cling to whatever of eternal promise is within 
the reaches of the soul, and feel after all divine 
consolations. It needs the night to bring out the 
stars. We believe in the stars, we know they are 
there in the heavenly spaces, but we do not see 
them " when brightly shines the prosperous day," 
we do not heed them until the sun is withdrawn 
and the night with its damps encamps about us. 
" Then darkness shows us worlds of light we never 
saw by day ; " and science teaches that those far- 
off worlds so minute in our experience are also 
suns to those who are near enough to see their 
splendors. 

Seasons of great tribulation are exceptional, 
but all men are burdened. The load of life 
which we do not feel in ordinary circumstances 
any more than a healthy body feels the weight of 
the earth's atmosphere, presses heavily at times, 
and seems greater than we can bear when occa- 
sional disturbance and sorrow of heart make us 
conscious of its weary weight. There are times in 



THE SPIRITS REST. 237 

all men's experience when consciousness responds 
to the cry of the "heavy laden," and confesses the 
need of rest to the soul. All men's burdens are 
not the same, but all are burdened, — some in their 
thoughts, some in their affairs, some in their con- 
sciences, some in their affections. Let us see how 
the Spirit meets these several occasions, and what 
is the rest it offers to souls thus tried. 

There are burdens of thought, — doubts, per- 
plexities, speculative and religious, grave ques- 
tions concerning the dark problems of provi- 
dence and destiny, of the soul's relations with the 
unseen, our calling in the present, our portion 
hereafter. This is a burden which weighs un- 
equally on different natures, according as their 
mental constitution inclines them to speculate and 
solve these problems for themselves, or to rest in 
hearsay and accept without demur the traditions 
of their time, or without hesitation to put them 
aside as old-world stories, outgrown and effete. 
The majority of men are little troubled with these 
questions ; they receive the current belief of their 
communion, but hold it so externally, so blindly, 
that their minds never come into contact with it, 
and have no spiritual property in it. Or perhaps 
under different influences they reject the current 
belief, but as undiscerningly as those who pro- 
fess it, and without accounting to themselves for 



238 THE SPIRITS REST. 

their unbelief, or attempting to replace the old 
confession with a new interpretation of the facts 
of life. 

Others there are who are haunted by these ques- 
tions, persecuted by them, like Paul and Justin 
Martyr and Augustine and Fox and Luther, driven 
into the wilderness, vexed and tortured and torn 
with doubts. To all such life is a problem which, 
as often as they ponder it, perplexes and confounds 
them with its hidden import. They cannot choose 
but strive with it, till they find relief in some 
adequate solution, or else in a final and clear con- 
viction that no such solution is possible to intellec- 
tual investigation. The soul asks, What am I and 
whence, and what is this nature which surrounds 
me ? Tradition answers with words and names 
which offer to clear the mystery, but which compli- 
cate it with new perplexities. Tradition affirms a 
divine order, by which all things are working to- 
gether for good; but we see all around disorders and 
disasters, woes and crimes, which seem incompat- 
ible with that all- wise and beneficent rule. We 
are taught to believe in moral obligation. That 
implies entire freedom to will and to do. But we 
see men everywhere the victims of circumstance, 
impelled by forces which sway their wills and con- 
trol their action. We are told of an immortal 
existence and a world to come illustrious with all 



THE SPIRITS REST. 239 

perfections. But we see the lamp of life go out ; 
the undiscovered country withholds its secret, and 
suffers no emigrant to recross its frontiers. 

To minds perplexed with these contradictions 
the Spirit addresses its invitation, " Come unto 
me, and I will give you rest." The proffered rest 
is not a scientific solution of these problems, not 
a logical demonstration of every question the in- 
tellect may put, but the lifting up of the soul into 
a region of intuitions, where the understanding 
may follow, indeed, but cannot lead, and where 
demonstration is superfluous. It is the answer 
of faith, which reconciles where philosophy had 
seemed to contradict, and restores what philoso- 
phy had seemed to destroy. 

There are different stages of mental experience 
in relation to spiritual truths. The first is the 
childish one of passive reception and implicit faith, 
the stage of authority ; in that we receive without 
question and without hesitation what teachers and 
books and popular tradition impart. Belief, in 
this stage, is acquiescence, not conviction ; it rather 
accepts than apprehends. The next stage is that 
of criticism. Here the understanding asserts it- 
self with exaggerated and often hostile activity. 
It doubts and cavils, and contradicts and denies. 
We are no longer satisfied with authority, we must 
try and test and judge for ourselves ; we question 



240 THE SPIRITS REST. 

and criticise and cross -question, and either end in 
total unbelief, or else pass on to the next and 
highest stage, which is that of faith, of spiritual 
insight, — that plane of the spirit where mere 
authority no longer avails except the authority of 
truth itself, that is, of immediate divine communi- 
cation, but where also doubt and contradiction are 
done away ; where intuitions supply the place of 
analysis, and groping inquiry is translated into 
vision. Let us, therefore, understand that what 
the spirit proposes as rest to mental perplexity and 
doubt is not a doctrinal system, but impulse and 
aid to the soul, enabling it to overcome or forget 
its critical scruples, and to rise above the region 
of argumentation into primary relations with the 
living Truth. It is not dogmatic authority, but 
spiritual attraction and elevation. 

We come next to the burdens of earthly affairs, 
— the cares of subsistence, the care of to-morrow ? 
and all the worry of the flesh and the world. 

No earthly good comes to us unconditionally. 
On everything we use a price is set. Our very ex- 
istence is not a gratuitous gift, but requires in the 
vast majority of cases a constant effort to main- 
tain it. But who of us is satisfied with bare sub- 
sistence ? Who limits his wants to a minimum of 
means? Who accepts the anchorite's or cynic's lot ? 
We all include in that term " subsistence " com- 



THE SPIRITS REST. 241 

forts exceeding absolute necessity, superfluities 
more or less, according to the social standard of 
our time. Moreover, we live not to ourselves 
alone, we are connected with others who de- 
pend upon us for their support. Hence, of neces- 
sity, all-engrossing, never-ceasing labors and cares 
which have temporal subsistence for their only 
end. It is hard, we sometimes think, this depend- 
ence on the flesh, hard for immortal spirits to 
wear the yoke of material necessity. The end of 
life, we say, is not meat and drink, but intellectual 
and moral growth, the unfolding of the image of 
God. It might therefore seem best that mere 
bodily subsistence should be furnished to all with- 
out care or pains. But the Wisdom that appointed 
our earthly lot has otherwise determined our neces- 
sities. There would be no labor if subsistence 
were secure ; and if no labor, then no discipline, 
no training, no growth. The labor expended on 
earthly things is a way of approach to heavenly 
things. Every man's calling is a school out of 
which the door opens into everlasting life. The 
graduate of earth's industrial establishments ac- 
quires the freedom of the city of God. Were we 
not compelled by stern necessity to toil and strive 
for material good, we should not, it is likely, strive 
at all, but dream away a useless existence, and 
end life no wiser and no better than we began it. 

16 



242 THE SPIRITS REST. 

Therefore life itself is conditioned. Its price is 
labor, — ceaseless effort not only to live well, but to 
live at all. But life so conditioned gives birth to 
a brood of cares which not only incite but fret the 
soul. Subsistence to most is a difficult problem ; 
their uttermost exertions scarce suffice for them- 
selves and those committed to their keeping. The 
little they possess is insecure ; accident may deprive 
them of that little, and plunge them and theirs into 
helpless dependence and distress. To all who are 
thus burdened, the Spirit calls : " Come unto me, 
and I will give you rest," — not rest from labor, 
but rest from harassing anxieties and cares ; rest 
from the agonizing doubts and fears which afflict 
the soul devoid of faith ; rest in the thought that 
God omnipotent reigneth, that eternal Wisdom 
and Mercy rule ; rest in that beautiful thought of 
the Gospel, — the Providence that feeds the fowls 
of the air and clothes the grass of the field, shall 
it not feed and clothe you ? — rest in the belief 
that He who called us into conscious being, and 
cast our lot on the hard necessities of earth and 
time, can have no other purpose in our being, 
and no other end in all hardness and trials, but 
our own exceeding good. 

Turn we now to another ingredient in this mor- 
tal load. 

There are burdens of conscience, — the sense of 



THE SPIRITS REST. 243 

unworthiness, the self-upbraidings of the heart for 
remembered transgressions, painful recollections 
of violated law, neglected duty, self-indulgence, 
the unsubdued appetite, the ungoverned passion, 
worldly concupiscence, the heart estranged from 
truth and God. These are reflections which some- 
times rise in judgment against us and fill the soul 
with deep unrest. We feel that we are not what 
we should be and might be. There shines the 
pure, unchangeable law ; here grovels our recreant 
life. How can we collate our poor doings, our 
wandering and sinful ways, with those ideals of 
heavenly sanctity and heavenly love which are 
set before us in the books, which are given in our 
own consciousness, and not feel ourselves abased 
and abashed, convicted and judged before the tri- 
bunal of God in the soul ? How shall we escape 
from the burden of this unworthiness ? Who shall 
deliver us from the body of this death ? For these 
sorrows and distresses of the burdened conscience 
the old religions had no resource but the priestly 
sacrifice, which, however in the faith of the wor- 
shipper it might seem to atone for the past, af- 
forded no pledge for the future. If it expiated 
foregone actual crimes, it furnished no redemption 
from the bonds of sin, it ministered no healing to 
the festering hurts of the soul, it provided no 
escape from the fatal entanglements of guilt. 



244 THE SPIRITS REST. 

Christianity meets the wounded spirit with such 
revelations of the infinite Love as show the very- 
penalties of sin resulting from natural and moral 
laws to be means and methods of spiritual growth, 
and sin itself, — repudiated and disowned by the con- 
trite heart, — the opportunity of grace more abound- 
ing. In its great and distinguishing doctrine of 
salvation by faith it ministers reconciliation to the 
conscience struggling with the crushing sense of be- 
setting sin, and opens heaven to all who truly desire 
and trustingly embrace the proffered gift. 

We have yet to speak of the burdens of affec- 
tion. All men live more or less in their affec- 
tions. No part of our nature is more fruitful 
of blessing, and none inflicts such poignant sor- 
row. If we weigh together all that we enjoy 
with all that we suffer from this source, it is hard 
to say whether one or the other, the good or the 
evil, preponderates in our experience. The deepest 
wounds which the heart receives in the battle of 
life, the most incurable, are the wounds of affec- 
tion. Love in its very nature has an element of 
sadness. When happiest in its object and least 
disturbed by the accidents of life, its consciousness 
is sombre, there is something of a sigh in its very 
fondness. And every affection in proportion to its 
fulness and intensity exposes the subject to im- 
minent anguish. Every affection contains a hope 



THE SPIRITS REST. 245 

which is liable to bitter disappointment. It may 
fail of an adequate return, or the object of it may 
prove unworthy, or death may interpose with its 
message of doom and rend the loved one from our 
embrace. Each of these fatalities is a matter of 
daily occurrence ; they are all familiar experiences 
of life. The amount of suffering involved in these 
experiences will differ with different individuals 
in the measure of their sensibility and self-con- 
trol ; but none are so insensible, none so entirely 
masters of themselves, as not to be painfully af- 
fected by them. Most mortals suffer more from 
this source than from all other causes of sorrow 
combined. To all so wrung, to all wounds of the 
heart, the Spirit advertises the balm of its rest, — 
rest in the thought that no unselfish affection is 
wasted, however its object may disappoint, for love 
is of God and leads to God; that though hearts 
perish, "hearts' loves remain," and that what 
affection sows in tears it is sure to reap in beauty 
and in joy. 

To all who are burdened, to all who are stricken, 
to all who mourn, the Spirit speaks to-day in the 
words of its immortal legacy, as in old Judaea in 
the far-away past it spoke through the lips of the 
flesh, — " Come unto me, all ye that labor and are 
heavy laden, and I will give you rest." 

But mark what follows, observe the condition 



246 THE SPIRIT'S REST. 

annexed to this rest, — " Take my yoke." Will it 
mock us, then, instead of relieving, will it give us a 
stone when we looked for bread, impose new bur- 
dens in addition to the old ? On the contrary, this 
yoke is one which makes all others bearable ; which, 
freely assumed and faithfully borne, imparts a 
magic and miraculous peace. The yoke of duty, — 
only they who take that upon them take rest to 
their souls. Only they who are harnessed with 
dutiful purpose and work in the traces of moral 
obligation can bear unmoved the burden of life. 
Duty is the one unfailing panacea of ultimately 
sure and blessed effect. There is the solution of 
every doubt ; there is your balm for every wound, 
your refuge in all distress. Are you a seeker after 
truth, endeavoring to fathom the reason of things 
and gravelled in the effort? Answer the call 
which is knocking at your soul to do the duty of 
the day, and you shall find the answer you seek. 
Do the will and you shall know of the doctrine. 
Are you troubled in your affairs, perplexed with the 
care of to-morrow ? Do the duty of to-day, and the 
morrow will take care of itself. Are you wounded 
in your affections, disappointed in your hopes? 
Has it fallen to your lot to part with your dearest ? 
Sacrifice to duty, and solace shall descend like dew 
from the very first offering which you lay upon 
that altar. 



THE SPIRITS REST. 247 

What next? "For I am meek and lowly." 
Humility is rest. How much of our vexations, 
our disappointments and sorrows, springs from our 
conceit, and the wild demands and disproportionate 
expectations which that conceit engenders ! What 
is it that our wishes, if we let them speak out, are 
ready to crave ? The uttermost of worldly good 
that ever fell to the lot of man, — uninterrupted 
prosperity, undisturbed peace, unbroken health, a 
perpetuity of earthly enjoyments. This is the 
secret purport of our desires. What presumption 
lurks in these unconscious cravings ! What right 
has any of us to uninterrupted happiness, or in- 
deed to any happiness at all ? What title can we 
show to the good we desire ? Let us learn to 
think little of ourselves, to moderate our claims, 
walk humbly and bring our expectations down to 
our deserts, as we hope to find rest to our souls. 

Whether or not we will suffer in this world it is 
not for us to say ; it has once for all been so or- 
dained. But how we will suffer, whether slavishly 
or freely, — whether we will take up the cross which 
life brings, in the spirit of patience and meek sub- 
mission, or have it forced and fastened upon us by 
inexorable destiny, — it is for us to determine ; and 
on this determination it depends how heavy our 
burden shall be, and how far it shall answer the 
ends of discipline. The world has burdens for all 



248 THE SPIRITS REST. 

who live in it. Necessity, sickness, frustrated pur- 
poses, disappointed hopes, perplexities, mortifica- 
tions, losses, and bereavements, — who can escape 
them ? These are the stuff of which life is made. 
To be human is to suffer. The Spirit does not 
promise immunity from pain ; it does not say, 
" Come unto me and you shall suffer no longer, 
but have good times forevermore, and revel in 
unalloyed and unbroken satisfactions," as if it were 
some garden of soft delights to which it calls us. 
What it says is, " Learn of me, in meekness and pa- 
tience and steadfast devotion, to do and to bear ; 
and though laboring and heavy-laden, across all 
the burdens and pains of mortality a rest divine 
shall stream into your souls." 



XVIII. 

THE EELIGION OF THE RESURRECTION". 

That I may know him, and the power of his resur- 
rection. Philippians iii. 10. 

r I "'HERE is a religion of the resurrection which 
the Christian world has never known. The 
creed of Christendom thus far has centred in the 
crucifixion. Christians in all these ages have been 
taught to die with Christ, but not to rise with him. 
The religion of the cross, — Christendom has had 
its fill of that. Through long centuries the doctrine 
of the Church has sought to disparage this earthly 
life in view of a promised heavenly life to come. It 
has taught men to look beyond the bounds of time 
and beyond the dissolutions of death for the better 
world of Christian hope. I cannot so interpret the 
sense of the New Testament. Heaven and earth, 
as contrasted in those writings, are not different 
places of abode divided by death, but different lev- 
els of human life. When the apostle says, " Set 
your affections on things above," he means, Strive 
to realize the Christian ideal in the here and now, 



250 THE RELIGION OF THE RESURRECTION. 

to make something better than has yet been made 
of this earthly life. The old religion thought to 
lay hold on heaven by disdaining and repudiating 
earth ; but the true way to possess heaven is to 
find it in earthly conditions. If you would realize 
your ideal, you must learn to idealize the real. 

The religion of the resurrection, — let me try to 
unfold to you some of the characteristics of such a 
religion as contrasted with the fading ideas and 
worn out methods of the past. 

1. The religion of the resurrection is spiritual 
emancipation. The religion of the past has been 
one of constraint, — " the spirit of bondage again 
to fear," instead of the spirit of adoption with its 
infinite trust. It has dogmatized and threatened 
and coerced. Its God has been a jealous God, 
jealous of his glory, all his action having that for 
its end. The French communist, being questioned, 
declared that he believed in no God ; if he did he 
should feel it his duty to oppose and wage war 
against " the almighty tyrant." That was the idea 
he had got from the teaching of the Church. The 
old religion presented itself as an enemy, not as 
a friend, — a frowning monitor confronting you at 
every turn, a foe to all the humanities. The world 
grew dark in its shadow wherever it prevailed. 
The Sunday with its stern requirements, its Puri- 
tan austerities, — what a weariness it was to the 



THE RELIGION OF THE RESURRECTION. 251 

children of a former generation ! If I should paint 
religion as presented to me in my childhood, it 
would be the figure of an executioner with uplifted 
lash. Instead of tempting the religious sentiment 
into free unfolding of itself by impressing the 
young heart with the beauty of truth and the ten- 
der sympathy of God, there went abroad a perverse 
notion that religion must be forced on the unrecep- 
tive and the disinclined, as Charlemagne forced 
Christianity on the Saxons by the pains of an 
unrelenting war ; as Cortez would convert the 
Mexicans at the point of the sword. You must 
be religious ; whether by nature so inclined or 
not, you must be religious, you must love the God 
whom we preach on pain of eternal damnation, — 
is what the Church has said and says. But who 
can love a God who is painted so unlovely ? Only 
that which attracts and delights can any man truly 
love. "Constraint," said a Christian Father, "is 
the Devil's method." 

2. Let us say, then, that the religion of the res- 
urrection is spiritual attraction ; the free inclina- 
tion of the heart to the Highest; worship of divine 
truth and love, enforced by no law, required by 
no precept, but prompted, elicited, magnetically 
evoked by their own sufficient and irresistible at- 
traction ; worship of God in Nature and God in 
man for his own transcendent beauty's sake. And 



252 THE RELIGION OF THE RESURRECTION. 

he who has never felt the beauty of Godhead and 
basked in it with admiring, longing love, has virtu- 
ally no God. He may be religious in the sense of 
faithful compliance with the forms and require- 
ments of his church ; that is well so far as it goes. 
Still it is the religion of the Law, not the religion 
of the Eesurrection ; it is the religion of a soul 
which the shadow of God has passed over and 
sobered with its gloom, not the electric response of 
the heart which the vision of God's beauty kindles. 
I emphasize this distinction between attraction 
and compulsion in religion. When religion is pre- 
sented as obligatory, the moral order is mistaken 
for the spiritual. Man's relation to the moral 
order is one of obligation. The voice of duty 
speaks in the imperative : Thou shalt, and Thou 
shalt not. To the spiritual or celestial order, on 
the contrary, the true relation is one of mutual 
attraction. The voice of religion is one of invi- 
tation, like the voice which the seer heard in Pat- 
mos, saying, " Come up higher." Religion invites ; 
morality commands. There are things which de- 
pend on the will, and may therefore be required 
of the will. There are others which depend on 
native gift, on inspiration, on the grace of God, 
and cannot be put as unconditionally binding. Re- 
ligion I reckon one of these. In the matter of 
physical decorum we may bid a child be clean, we 



THE RELIGION OF THE RESURRECTION. 253 

cannot bid him be beautiful or graceful. So in 
things appertaining to mental behavior we require 
a man to be just and honest, we cannot require 
him to be generous or brave. Nor can we, against 
the grain of his nature, demand of a man that he 
shall be religious. We may say with truth that 
religion is the height of human nature, — that with- 
out it the uttermost of power, beauty, goodness, and 
blessedness can never be realized, — but we can- 
not say that a man is bound to be religious in the 
same sense in which he is bound to be upright and 
true. It is a mischievous exaggeration to say that 
religion is the one thing needful ; there are things 
more needful than that. Religion must be appre- 
hended as a grace, a charm, a beauty, a happy 
privilege, instead of a burden and an obligation, 
if Christendom is ever to rise with Christ and to 
know the power of his resurrection. 

The Church of Rome in the midst of her cor- 
ruptions developed one conception in which unwit- 
tingly the true nature of religion was symbolized, 
had the Church but understood her own symbol- 
ism, and practically embraced the religion she 
symbolized. Among the sanctities which shine 
conspicuous in Catholic mythology the foremost 
figure is the Virgin Mary ; and the power of that 
sanctity consists in its grace, — it is pure attraction. 
Other sanctities may overawe, but the heavenly 



254 THE RELIGION OF THE RESURRECTION. 

Virgin, combining the beauty of the maiden with 
the mother's tenderness, can only attract. There 
is nothing in it which can terrify ; there is nothing 
wanting in it that can win, encourage, and console. 
Christian art has produced no face of Christ so 
expressive of the characteristic grace of Christian- 
ity, so emblematic of the religion of the resurrec- 
tion, as the face of the Virgin in the pictures of 
Andrea del Sarto, of Correggio, of Raphael. It 
has given us the Christ of the Last Supper, the 
Teacher and Master ; it has given us the " Ecce 
Homo," the immortal Sufferer symbolizing the 
religion of the cross ; but when we seek an equal 
symbol of the religion of the resurrection we 
must look to the Sistine Madonna, — the Virgin 
with the babe in her arms ; an infinite beatitude 
in the mother's eye, an infinite promise in that 
of the child. 

3. The religion of the resurrection is self-sur- 
render, which is something very different from the 
self-abasement and self-crucifixion enjoined or com- 
mended by ancient standards of devotion. There 
we seem to see always a taint of self-seeking, a 
bargain with Heaven in which penance and volun- 
tary hardship and self-inflicted crosses are to be 
accepted as the price of future, eternal rewards. 
The idea of reward, of a heaven of rewards, with 
which Christian literature is saturated, has com- 



THE RELIGION OF THE RESURRECTION. 255 

pletely eclipsed in the common mind the true and 
radical idea of religion as a free embrace of the 
Eternal. The best thing in religion is the oppor- 
tunity it offers of deliverance from self; emanci- 
pation from selfish, howbeit unworldly, cares and 
fears, from all concern about the hereafter of the 
soul ; such a sense of the eternal, such enjoyment 
of it in the here and now, as shall drive these cares 
clean out of the mind. Instead of seconding this 
offer and this relief, the religion of the past has 
sought to increase that concern, to make men espe- 
cially anxious about themselves, about the salva- 
tion of their own souls, as if that were the one sole 
end of being. What is the first and chief question 
to which religion has invited attention ? " What 
must I do to be saved ? " That is to be made the 
chief study, and the answer to that the guide of 
life. If I rightly understand the heart of the gos- 
pel, the question, u What must I do to be saved ? " 
is not the question which most demands to be con- 
sidered. The dwelling on that question, if per- 
sisted in, cannot fail to have an injurious effect. 
There are cases, there is a time, when this question 
is a very legitimate one, and not to be put by. 
But on the whole, whatever draws attention to self, 
whatever sets men to thinking about themselves 
and worrying about themselves, has a tendency to 
foster narrowness and to make religion a kind of 



256 THE RELIGION OF THE RESURRECTION. 

self-seeking, — self-seeking, it is true, in an un- 
worldly sense, but still self-seeking. Religion offers 
deliverance from self, and that is religion's hap- 
piest office. For what is this self which we want 
to save, and cherish so fondly, as if it were our 
chief possession ? If we were wise, we should see 
that safe though it be, it can never satisfy ; that 
the best we can do with it is to forget it. There 
was no self in that mythical Eden before the Fall. 
There will be no self in the Paradise regained of 
the perfected spirit that ever beholds the face of 
the Father, and never separates itself from God. 
That which we call self exists only by derivation 
and limitation ; it has no independent being, it can 
never attain to independent being, but on the con- 
trary, if true to its calling, will lose more and 
more the conceit of independence, and count it all 
joy to hide itself in the infinite Self, — the " rest" 
that remains " to the people of God." 

That old self-questioning religion, the religion 
of fear, the religion which spent itself in anxious 
inquiries, " What must I do to be saved ? " has 
lost its hold on cultivated minds. The religion of 
the resurrection, with new perceptions of human 
destiny and a new interpretation of the meaning of 
life, must restore the power of the Spirit now in 
abeyance and re-establish its sway in human life. 
For Spirit is the rightful Lord of this earth, and 



THE RELIGION OF THE RESURRECTION. 257 

spiritual power is that which reaches deepest into 
the heart of the world. The first superficial view 
of human life presents material industry as the 
leader and ruler of society. It shows trade as the 
God of this world, ubiquitous, untiringly active, 
compelling all other agencies to toil in his service, 
setting countless hands at work in mines and mills, 
breathing hot vapor from countless iron throats, 
piercing the ear of night with the agonizing scream 
of the steam-whistle, out-speeding the wind, putting 
the lightning in harness to go on his errands, en- 
gaging the human race to furnish his merchandise, 
and sending it into every remote corner of the hab- 
itable earth. All this thousand -fold activity with 
which the world palpitates, flashes, and thunders 
from shore to shore, which every year grows noi- 
sier and more confusing, is born of traffic and prop- 
agates traffic, forever multiplying its progeny as if 
human nature had no other end. 

This is what the first view presents ; but look 
again, look deeper, and you will find that these 
activities so conspicuous, so engrossing, owe their 
first impulse to something higher than themselves. 
Trade is the offspring of civilization, and civiliza- 
tion, if we trace its origin, will be found to have 
derived its quickening breath from religion. Every- 
where religion has been the pioneer, and indus- 
try and commerce have followed in her steps. 

17 



258 THE RELIGION OF THE RESURRECTION. 

She has sent her missionaries to the ends of the 
earth, and the ends of the earth have exchanged 
with each other their products and their arts. 
Material forces are everywhere at work, they fill 
the whole field of immediate vision, but the powers 
that most profoundly sway the world and recreate 
society are spiritual powers. Moses and Zoroaster 
and Christ and Mohammed have originated the 
great social movements which age after age reflect 
their image and celebrate their name. These are 
the mountain peaks whence gash the rivers that 
make glad the earth and bear the seeds of civili- 
zation from land to land. 

The religion of the resurrection will recover the 
spirit that gave birth to the Christian ages, will 
manifest that spirit by casting off the abuses and 
corruptions and effete traditions of the Church, 
will reproduce the life-giving power of the early 
gospel, and become once more a prevailing force 
in the world. New born of this spirit, the Church 
will no longer know Christ after the flesh, but 
know him in the power of his resurrection, and 
knowing him thus, will cease to dogmatize about 
his person or to dogmatize at all ; will rid itself 
of all compulsory dogmas and enforced beliefs, of 
sectarian barriers and ecclesiastical separations, 
of all forms from which the spirit and the life 
have departed ; will make the Christian confession 



THE RELIGION OF THE RESURRECTION. 259 

identical with love to God and man and the ser- 
vice of God in man, of the Father in the Son ; 
will make mutual aid and edification the limit and 
bond of Christian fellowship. 

4. I add, as the last and crowning grace of the 
religion of the resurrection, spiritual sanity. Of 
true religion I know no trait more characteristic 
than perfect health. There is a kind of piety — 
the history of religion abounds in such — which 
suggests disease ; religion with the downcast look, 
moping, fearful, sad. I spoke of the Virgin of 
the Romish Church as the symbol of a free and 
gracious faith. The opposite type of morbid piety 
I find in Saint Clara of Assisi, of whom it was said 
that she never but once lifted her eyelids so much 
as to show the color of her eyes, and that was to 
receive the Pope's blessing. Shall we praise those 
downcast eyes ? Rather with the Psalmist, " I will 
lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence Com- 
eth my help," — to those heights of Humanity 
where live the sacred memories of all the risen, 
and testify of the vast possibilities of life. 

True piety feels everywhere the immediateness 
of the divine presence, and has that joy in Nature 
and life which only the deep consciousness of God 
can give. And though it sees that the world is 
full of sorrow and crime, it sees also compensation 
and redemption for all. It carries its own heaven 



260 THE RELIGION OF THE RESURRECTION. 

into all the hells that lie in its way, and, like Jesus 
in the legend, comes forth from the underworld 
unscathed, leading captivity captive. " The faith- 
ful in the resurrection," says the Mohammedan 
seer, will wonderingiy ask, " Did not our way 
hither lead close by the brink of hell ? How is it 
that we saw neither smoke nor flame ?" And the 
answer will be, " You came by that way indeed ; 
but what to others is hell and the abyss, to you 
was paradise." 

The religion of the resurrection is perfect health, 
and therefore joy evermore, — not the joy of fit- 
ful excitement, the effervescence of a lawless spirit 
which sparkles and hisses for a moment like the 
foam in the wine-glass, and like that evaporates 
and is gone forever, but resembling rather the 
constant juices of the earth which produce the 
wine in its season and duly replenish the cup of 
life ; an indestructible joy in being, joy in the as- 
surance of the everlasting order, joy in the con- 
sciousness of the everlasting Friend, joy in the 
dear consuetudes of life, joy in the present with 
all its benedictions, joy in the future with all its 
resurrections. 



XIX. 

LOVE IS OF GOD. 

Love is of God. . . . God is Love. 

1 John iv. 7, 16. 

THE doctrine of God's omnipresence in crea- 
tion — the great truth that God is not out- 
side of the world, but in the world, enfolding it, 
pervading it — is the dearest conquest of modern 
thought in the province of theology. The mani- 
festations of divine agency in Nature may all be 
summed under two heads, — Intelligence and Love. 
It is the latter of which I am now to speak. 

Writers on natural theology have labored to 
demonstrate the love of God by reckoning up the 
various provisions made for human well-being in 
the animal structure, and the apt arrangements of 
the world on which the animal is cast. I confess I 
am not much impressed with the cogency of these 
proofs. Say that life on the whole is a blessing, 
and you have said about all that can be fairly 
urged, all that it seems to me discreet to say on 
that head. For when you insist on the many 



262 LOVE IS OF GOD. 

sources of pleasure in human life, animal and 
social, I am driven to think of the many sources 
of pain, of the aches and ails, the griefs and woes, 
the devastations and horrors, of which human 
existence is so largely composed, and the bitter 
experience of which has raised in thoughtful minds 
the question whether evil or good preponderates in 
the lot of man, 

But what does impress me and assure me, as an 
ever new proof and illustration of the love of God, 
is the love which God has implanted in his crea- 
tures, — the love by which they subsist, which one 
generation transmits to another, which peoples the 
earth and binds the units of humanity in social 
wholes. Do you ask what is beautiful in Nature ? 
It is the love of the brute mother for her offspring. 
Surely this love is of God, — the truest illustration, 
to my mind the most convincing demonstration, of 
that divine love which theology affirms. Is there 
any figure of rhetoric in the New Testament so 
touching as that of the hen gathering her chickens 
under her wings ? Is there any fact in zoology so 
resplendent as that of the fiercest of beasts, the 
tigress, offering her body as a target to intercept 
the missile which would pierce her cub ? Call it 
blind, unreasoning instinct, if you will ; all the 
more do I see in it and admire and adore in it 
the present God. 






LOVE IS OF GOD. 263 

If any one thinks to invalidate the force of this 
idea by contending that the brute's ferocity is just 
as instinctive and therefore just as divine as the 
brute-mother's love of her offspring, I answer that 
though love is of God, it is not the whole of God ; 
or rather, perhaps, I should say that these so ob- 
vious and beautiful manifestations of that love are 
not its only manifestations. A profounder theo- 
logy than we find in our text-books may, instead of 
blinking and slurring them over, as the custom has 
been, learn to interpret the instinctive fiercenesses 
and fightings of the animal world in evident in- 
telligible accordance with the infinite Love ; may 
find the middle term which shall resolve this dual- 
ism of nature, its beatitudes and its horrors, its loves 
and its carnage, into that deeper unity which piety 
divines, and which it is a moral necessity of our 
nature to believe. 

Meanwhile, if Nature and life are not all love 
let us hold to the truth that what love there is is 
of God, — in Nature and life the divinest thing. 
By love understand not any single affection, but 
that principle in human nature which draws us out 
of ourselves and makes us forget self in the service 
of our kind. In the human sphere, — this is the 
point to which I now call your attention, — in the 
human sphere it is love that makes society possi- 
ble, and without love society could not be. Not 



264 



LOVE IS OF GOD. 



by self-interest, not by mutual necessity, not by a 
contract originating in that necessity, as Rousseau 
feigned, but mainly by the binding power of love 
does society subsist. 

It might seem that enlightened self-interest 
should draw men together and band them in one , 
but no such band would satisfy the social needs of 
mankind. Something more than self-interest is 
required to shape and propagate civil society. 
Imagine a world in which self-interest should be 
the only motive-power, and suppose it never so 
enlightened, a world of pure intelligences if you 
please, and you will find, if you dwell on that idea, 
that something would be wanting to constitute a 
commonwealth. Such a world would be an aggre- 
gation of private wealths, but no commonwealth. 
Self-interest, however enlightened, possesses no at- 
tractive force, it has no principle in it of perma- 
nent cohesion. 

It is not the coming of many together that makes 
society, but the social instinct in the heart of man, 
that causes the coming together. Men talk of the 
social contract as if society originated in that way, 
but society existed before any contract. The first 
contract we read of was one of separation, not of 
union. Abraham said to Lot, " Let there be no 
strife, I pray thee, between thee and me ... if 
thou wilt take the left hand, then I will go to the 



LOVE IS OF GOD. 265 

right." Society is not a product of the human 
will. It is not a thing which we originate by com- 
pacts and covenants. On the contrary, it origi- 
nates those compacts, and has its own origin in 
aboriginal man. God made society. It is the 
last and divinest of his creations. And in it he 
lodged a spark of that love in which he and his 
heavens have their being. For love is. of God, and 
God is love. 

The fire then kindled has never gone out. 
Through all the revolutions of time, its births and 
its deaths, the rise and fall of empires and reli- 
gions, through old and new ages, it has burned 
and burns, unquenched and unquenchable. The 
child that is born this day inherits it, is nour- 
ished by it, subsists by it, and would inevitably 
perish without it. It glows in the breast of every 
mother who folds her little one in the covert of 
her arms. It sparkles in young eyes that seek each 
other with that elective affection of youth and 
maiden which song and story celebrate, — the 
fairest flower of time. It is a motion in the blood 
of kindred hearts, a yearning in the thought of 
consenting minds. It is courage and consecra- 
tion in the martyr's soul. It is aspiration and 
sounding praise in the temples of all faiths. 
Every offering of pure self-sacrifice is kindled by 
it ; every blow that is struck for freedom and man 



266 LOVE IS OF GOD, 

is nerved by it ; and when ages degenerate and 
faiths corrupt, it is this that purifies and redeems 
the world. 

Of this fire there is no waste. The most pre- 
cious thing beneath the sun, it is the only thing 
that needs no husbanding. In lavishness consists 
its true husbandry. The more it is expended, the 
more there is left. The heat of the sun, which for 
so many ages has supplied the life of the material 
world, and which has suffered no appreciable 
diminution within the limits of recorded time, is 
nevertheless subject to diminution ; and science 
from that diminution predicts a time when vege- 
table and animal life must cease from the earth. 
And if the fire of the moral world, if the love 
which God first kindled in the bosom of society 
were found to be a diminishing quantity, however 
slow the rate of decrease, a time must come when 
society would dissolve and humanity perish through 
loss of this radical heat. Is love in the world a 
diminishing quantity ? History answers, No ! If 
it languishes in one place, it abounds in another ; 
if it smoulders here, it burns with irrepressible 
fervor there. There have been periods in the 
world's history when love seemed to be dying out 
from the heart of man, when egoism and depraved 
ambition acquired such ascendency in human af- 
fairs as to threaten the dissolution of the social 



LOVE IS OF GOD. 267 

state and a general lapse into barbarism. There 
was a time when the world seemed decrepit and 
chill with age, and about to drop into the palsies 
of death. The weight of empire still cumbered 
the earth, but the soul of the civilization which 
reared it was extinct. Patriotism had come to be 
a phantom of the brain, religion the dream of a 
bygone age, and honor a breath that no longer 
refreshed. The family hearth had lost its sacred- 
ness ; marriage was a temporary convenience, no 
longer a permanent bond. The public altar still 
palpitated with the offerings of custom, but no 
longer glowed with the sacrifice of faith. A ram- 
pant selfishness had established itself in rite and 
office, in government and home, and had scared 
the traditional sanctities and old affections from 
all their haunts. Such was Rome in her decline, 
and Rome embraced the larger portion of the civ- 
ilized world. 

But all this while, through all the years of 
this decay, in a corner apart the sacred fire was 
still maintained. Fanned by the Holy Spirit, it 
burned a still and reverent flame. Often stamped 
upon by a jealous state, but never stamped out, 
it burned in crypts and cells, and private stead- 
fast souls, till the time came when the veil 
could be removed and the fire blaze freely in 
the face of day, and defying the winds of per- 



268 LOVE IS OF GOD. 

secution, flame all the fiercer for every adverse 
blast. Whereby at last the old world and the 
works that were therein were burned up, and a 
new heaven and a new earth, attempered to the 
flame and quickened by it, replaced the old. The 
life and fire of humanity were then all concen- 
trated in the Christian Church. The love which 
had almost disappeared from Gentile civilization 
was stored and cherished in Christian breasts. 
" How these Christians love one another ! " said 
the wondering Gentiles, when high and low, free- 
man and slave, were seen to embrace each other 
in the public street. From the Christian Church 
as a centre, from the sacred heart of Christ, the 
centre of that church, new tides of love were 
diffused through the world. 

The continued existence of society is proof suffi- 
cient that love on this earth is not a diminishing 
quantity. Is it an increasing one, or only constant ? 
This is the question of questions ; it concerns the 
destiny of society. On the latter supposition so- 
ciety will endure, but will never be better than it 
now is. The heat of the material world is thus 
far a constant quantity. Every expenditure of it is 
compensated by its just equivalent in some other 
of the forces of material nature. The lump of coal 
which burns on your hearth to-day gives out so 
much heat, and no more than it took from the 






LOVE IS OF GOD. 269 

sun in some remote age when it grew as vegetable 
substance on the surface of the earth. And the 
heat it gives out is not lost. It turns into motion, 
it is represented by one or another form of elemen- 
tal action, it passes on from state to state of ma- 
terial existence, until in due course it fulfils its 
circuit and turns into so much heat again. In 
the form of heat or motion there is always so 
much force at work in the universe, — no more 
and no less. Heat in the material world is a con- 
stant quantity ; and Nature endures, but does not 
improve, from age to age. 

But the heat of the moral world, we are fain to 
believe, is an increasing quantity. The fact of this 
increase is indemonstrable. Its strongest proof is a 
whisper at the heart that it must be so, if humanity 
has not been fashioned in vain. Belief in the grad- 
ual but ceaseless growth of good until good shall 
vanquish and subdue the evil that is in the world, — 
this, if not a sure conclusion of the understanding, 
is a necessary article of faith. And if love is an 
increasing quantity, slow though the increase be, 
the condition of humanity in ages to come will 
exhibit the effects of that increase in a new and 
better system of social life. Friends of humanity, 
dreamers of philanthropic dreams, may expect the 
realization of their visions from that increase, and 
that alone. Social science cannot give it, though 



270 LOVE IS OF GOD. 

social science may do a good work in pointing out 
the measures and methods by which love is to 
operate, and in directing its applications. No social 
reform can be relied on as stable, but that which 
springs from a radical and substantial growth of 
human nature in moral life, — that is, from an in- 
crease of love. A very slight increase of this or- 
ganic force would accomplish wonders of social 
reform, as a slight difference in the trend of the 
ecliptic would make a difference of climate repre- 
sented on the one side by the glacier, on the other 
by the palm. Without social science, a little more 
love in the heart of society would give us paradise. 
The abolition of how many wrongs, the reduction 
of how much misery, the extinction of how much 
sin, the growth of how many graces and charities 
and tropical affections, would attest and reward the 
ameliorated climate of the soul ! A little more 
love, and the New Jerusalem would drop from the 
heavens like dew, and a socialism without pedan- 
try or calculation would readjust the polities of 
earth to the new ideal of a blessed life. 

Meanwhile for us individually, the first and near- 
est concern is not the increase of love in the world, 
but its growth in ourselves. Are we wise enough 
to desire that growth ? Have we sufficient belief 
in love really to covet it ? How many things we 
covet, misled by their tinsel lustre, that are infi- 






LOVE IS OF GOD. 271 

nitely less essential to well being. Gifts of for- 
tune, gifts of person, gifts of mind, riches, beauty, 
learning, wit, — how they charm us ! How blessed 
we can fancy ourselves with these endowments ! 
These are the things we would select if some 
good genius, like the fairies of nursery lore, should 
offer a choice of gifts and goods. One would 
choose wealth, one genius, another empire ; a 
fourth, more modest, the return of love. Who 
would choose love without thought of return, — 
love not for one, but for all mankind ? We read 
of a Hebrew king who chose wisdom for him- 
self out of all that God in a vision presented to 
his choice, but I know no story of one who chose 
love. Yet sure I am that no fairy gift would so 
richly contribute to one's own, not to speak of 
others' well being, as a heart full of love. The 
Hebrew king chose wisdom, and became an idola- 
ter, became a libertine. His wisdom could not save 
him from this egregious folly. And the land which 
he ruled, demoralized by his vices, fell asunder 
after his death, never to be united again. Had 
love instead of wisdom been the monarch's dower, 
the chronicles of Israel might have told a different 
tale. It might have been a story of a prosperous, 
united, and progressive nation, instead of secession, 
captivity, and shame. 

The best that society has received or can re- 



272 LOVE IS OF GOD. 

ceive from the All-Giver is a fresh dispensation 
of this celestial heat. More than genius, more 
than intellectual achievement, it promotes human 
progress by reinforcing the motive power on which 
all progress depends. Genius is a thing to be 
admired, not imparted. Like a splendid constel- 
lation in the nightly heaven, we must look up 
to it in order to be aware of its presence. But 
love is a sunbeam, a piece of the universal Love 
which has struggled down to us from the ever- 
lasting Fountain through all the mists and chills 
of earth. It comes unsought into our dwellings. 
We need not go forth in quest of it ; it finds 
its way through narrow chinks and windows be- 
grimed with smoke and dust into the lowliest hut, 
and flings a heavenly glory on rude walls and the 
squalid scenes they enclose. And like the sun it 
is as indispensable as it is glorious. We can do 
without genius or wit, but what would the world 
be without love ? We live in the words and acts 
of our fellow-men. Examine the record in your 
memory, and see how the life which you lead is 
something reflected to you from all with whom you 
come in contact, and how much your comfort is 
affected by your intercourse with others, and how 
it seemed like basking in the sun when at any time 
you conversed with one who showed you kind- 
ness in word or deed, the simplest word or deed. 



LOVE IS OF GOD. 273 

I may seem to indulge in unpracticable rhap- 
sody. Of what use is it to enlarge thus upon any 
sentiment ? Can we by commanding will it into 
being? Alas, no ! love is of God. It is a talent, a 
gift ; it cannot be forced into being where it is not, 
nor where it is scant can it be greatly increased 
by an effort of the will. Only by use and constant 
use of what there is of it in any heart, can it wax 
in fervor and power. In the order of Providence 
it is very unequally distributed. In some it is a 
strong and overcoming fire, in others a feeble 
spark that refuses to burst into flame. Whenever 
in any soul an exceptional measure is lodged of 
that miraculous force there begins a new era in 
human affairs. From the heart so endowed a vir- 
tue goes forth which purges away the old corrup- 
tion and inaugurates a new heaven and a new 
earth. And thus, though unequally distributed as 
cause and originating power, the issues of love are 
equally diffused, and its mission is as broad as life. 
From time to time God sends into the world a lover 
of his kind whose affections are bounded by no pri- 
vate ties, whose brothers and sisters are all who 
consent with him, and whose bride is society. 
Then it is as if a new sun were created and set 
a-blazing to illumine and bless the earth. We 
subjects of the Christian dispensation are living 
on the love of our great Brother, who cast his 

18 



274 LOVE IS OF GOD. 

divine self into the life of the world, and made it 
richer and sweeter for all succeeding time. Then, 
and not before, the idea of humanity dawned upon 
the world, — mankind one family in God, an or- 
ganic, corporate whole, — many members and one 
body ; and Paul, the most far-sighted of the early 
disciples, anticipating social science, uttered the 
great word so strange to Jewish and Gentile ears : 
" There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither 
bond nor free, there is neither male nor female : 
for ye are all one in Christ Jesus." 

We are members one of another. The idea is 
received ; but to feel its import, to live and work 
in its spirit, is a stage of progress which Christian 
civilization has not attained. That it will be at- 
tained, I hold it an essential part of Christian 
faith to believe. Its attainment would be the com- 
ing of the kingdom for which, as taught by the 
Master, the Church through so many ages has 
prayed. Can it be that the prayer so commended 
is a vain aspiration, the formal utterance of an 
idle dream ? To suppose it is blasphemy ; to be- 
lieve it is despair. 

"Thy kingdom come" is the first prayer our 
mothers teach us ; it is the last whose import we 
fully realize. Infant lips all over Christendom 
have stammered or will stammer this petition to- 
day. If ever the time shall come when manly 



LOVE IS OF GOD. 275 

hearts all over Christendom shall breathe it in 
sincerity, when manly wills all over Christendom 
shall adopt it in sincerity, the prayer will be an- 
swered, and Christendom will be as beautiful as 
the dream of John the divine, when he dreamed of 
the crystal river and the day without night. 



XX. 

OUR LIFE IS IN GOD. 

In him we live, and move, and have our being. 

Acts xvii. 28. 

TTERE is a view of the Divine nature very dif- 
A ferent from that of the current theology, — 
a view which includes what truth there is in the 
doctrine known as pantheism, and yet is not pan- 
theism as commonly understood. Pantheism as 
commonly understood means that nothing exists but 
God ; that all other being, all rational as well as 
irrational existences, are merely states and modes 
of the divine. Paul does not mean this. He does 
not say that all being is God, but that all being is 
in God. We may concede to pantheism that all 
finite existences partake of the substance of God, 
but not that all agency is God's, not that all action 
is divine. The main point is, that God is not to 
be conceived as an insulated individual being, hav- 
ing only a governmental connection with the world. 
The vulgar conception separates the Creator from 
his creatures, insulates him, enthrones him in soli- 



OUR LIFE IS IN GOD. 277 

tary grandeur in a region of his own far away in 
unknown space ; it supposes the omnipresence as- 
cribed to him to be a presence by knowledge and 
will, not a substantial presence, not a presence in 
person; it supposes that God governs the world 
not by immediate action, but by deputy, or by a 
prescribed, self-working constitution. Paul, on the 
contrary, conceives that God is himself the con- 
stitution of things ; that he governs by immediate 
action on every part ; that he is not in any partic- 
ular place, because all places are in him ; that, as 
Newton says, he is everywhere present, not by his 
power alone, but present in substance, and is every- 
where eye, ear, hand ; that the life which we lead, 
the will by which we act, are embraced in his 
essence ; that all our acts are comprehended in the 
sweep of his will, all our experience in the scope 
of his design, and finally, that we realize our being 
only, and have the true enjoyment of it only as we 
find it in him. 

"Live, move, and have our being," — these terms 
may be considered as indicating three points of 
connection, three distinct relations of man with 
God. They are named in ascending order, and so 
present a graduated scale of human experience. 
Let us take them in the order in which they are 
given. 

1. " In him we live." We are animated beings. 



278 OUR LIFE IS IN GOD. 

The first and lowest in human experience is the 
animal life. This we have in common with the 
brute creation, and this lowest in our experience 
is perhaps the most miraculous. What is so mi- 
raculous as life ? In its simplest, meanest form it 
marks a difference which is infinite between the 
creations of man and of God. Take the cunning- 
est engine that ever man invented, — and he has 
invented some that aptly mimic the functions of 
Nature, — place it by the side of the simplest ani- 
mal organism, a worm or a moth, and see what a 
gulf divides the living creature from the most in- 
genious inanimate thing. Compare your watch, 
the consummate product of human skill, with the 
meanest reptile. In that little instrument the 
science and the art, the crafty invention and pa- 
tient elaboration of successive ages are represented. 
But let the watch run down and it has no power in 
itself to renew its function ; the helping touch of 
man must be repeated, or all the labor bestowed 
upon it is vain. It has no self-motion. That 
which the meanest reptile possesses is wanting to 
it, — the miracle of life. The reptile may lie tor- 
pid like the watch run down, apparently dead, 
but within the seemingly lifeless form there is 
something going on ; the miracle of life continues, 
which by and by will cause the creature to awake, 
and without the aid of any finite agent to resume 






OUR LIFE IS IN GOD. 279 

its functions, unwind its coils, lift up its head, and 
crawl again. And when the animal really dies, 
as we say, when the individual perishes, when that 
organism is dissolved, the miracle of life continues 
still ; the atoms which composed it survive in new 
combinations, new forms of vegetable and animal 
nature spring from its ruins, and others again will 
spring from theirs ; and thus in an endless succes- 
sion of forms the undying principle endures. 

The individual perishes, but the life that was in 
it does not. Here is a difference which is infinite. 
No work of man's device can ever of itself give birth 
to another, nor can the particles which compose it 
without human aid take on new forms and incor- 
porate themselves with new creations. It is within 
the reach of human ingenuity to fabricate exact 
imitations of animal organisms. But no conceiv- 
able advance of art through endless ages will ever 
succeed in breathing into those fabrics the breath 
of life. If we ask what it is that thus broadly 
distinguishes divine from human creations, we find 
ourselves facing an impenetrable mystery. We 
call it life, and that is all we can say about it. 
Recent science has sought to derive the multifold 
species of plant and brute from certain rudimental 
forms, which in process of time are supposed to 
have given rise to all the varieties of vegetable 
and animal life which now overspread the earth. 



280 OUR LIFE IS IN GOD. 

But the life itself, its first beginning in those abo- 
riginal forms, no naturalist by operation of natural 
causes could ever explain. No physical laws, no 
material agents, no action of heat and moisture, 
no favoring conditions of soil and clime, could 
ever supply the desired link, could ever bridge the 
portentous gulf between an inanimate and a living 
thing. For the origin of life all thoughtful, honest 
science must assume a supernatural cause, must 
look to a Power beyond the horizon of material 
nature, — that Power which religion knows and 
adores as God. 

But more than this is implied in the saying, " In 
him we live." It is not enough to derive from God 
the beginning of life on the earth, to suppose that 
creative Power first started and then left to itself 
the current of animated being, which ever since 
has flooded the world, " and still keeps flowing on." 
What physical laws could not originate, they can- 
not maintain. Every new birth of animated being 
is as much a miracle as the first. Not an individ- 
ual in all the realms of Nature is born into the 
world to-day but has its life direct from God, as 
much so as the first animalcule or the first man. 
And not only so, but the preservation, the contin- 
uation of that life from day to day, from moment 
to moment, is as much a divine operation as its 
first beginning. For life is not to be conceived as 



OUR LIFE IS IN GOD. 281 

something detached from its parent source, which 
being imparted to any subject persists by its own 
inherent virtue and by generation propagates itself 
from one to another, but rather as a constant flow 
into countless forms of one undivided power. It 
is a childish conception which supposes that the 
creature is first made, and that when completed the 
life is breathed into it. Rather, the life takes on 
the form, and lays it aside when it lists. For still 
it is the form, the individual, that perishes; the life 
endures. And that life is from God, is in God ; in 
fact, it is the ever-living God himself who presents 
these forms, reveals himself in them, holds them 
up for a while, and lets them drop when his pur- 
pose in them and through them is answered. And 
this is what is meant when it is said, "In Him 
we live." 

2. We pass to the next point in Paul's statement, 
which is, that in God we " move." Not locomotion, 
for that is included in animal life, but intellectual 
and moral action, is to be understood as intended 
by this term. Not only is the power to act the con- 
tinuous gift of God, — a power which would cease 
on the instant if God for an instant could cease to 
impart it; but all human action is comprehended 
in the scheme of God, in that divine process, that 
steady onward movement by which individuals and 
the race are led to their predetermined goal. A 



282 OUR LIFE IS IN GOD. 

superficial view of life discovers so much of seem- 
ing irregularity and accident, of fatality and luck, 
that one is tempted to deny any meaning or pur- 
pose in human events, and to fancy that the world 
is abandoned to chance. But a moment's reflec- 
tion corrects this illusion. It is just as incredible 
that the world is governed by chance as it is that 
the world was made by chance ; that the course of 
events has no method or purpose, as it is that cre- 
ation has no plan or end. And if the world is not 
governed by chance, if the course of events as a 
whole is divinely determined, then the action and 
the destinies of each individual, as parts of that 
whole, are also determined ; then all private voli- 
tions are embraced in the onward sweep of the 
parent Will, all private fortunes included in the 
scheme of divine rule. 

You have had perhaps your own life plan, but 
have not succeeded in accomplishing your ends. 
Unforeseen or unavoidable disasters, the fatality of 
circumstance, the opposing elements, the enmity or 
treachery of your fellow-men, or perhaps your own 
weakness, have caused the miscarriage of your cher- 
ished schemes, and made utter shipwreck of your 
fortunes. You look back on the years that are past, 
and seem to yourself to have labored in vain, to have 
spent your strength for naught. Your bravest ven- 
tures have miscarried, your fondest hopes have been 



OUR LIFE IS IN GOD. 283 

rebuffed. Read in the light of your early dreams, 
your life appears to you a failure. It is no such 
thing. It matters comparatively little ; and when 
the eyes of your spirit are opened you will see and 
acknowledge that it matters but little whether your 
schemes concerning yourself have been adopted by 
God and have tallied or not with his designs con- 
cerning you. Your way of life as you planned it 
has failed, has deviated widely, to your feeling sadly, 
from the path you had marked out for yourself ; but 
it has not deviated one hair's breadth from the path 
which God, in whom we move, had prescribed for 
your goings. You may have seemed to yourself 
to be failing, falling, losing your hold of life and 
peace, but all the while you were moving in God ; 
he has held you in his embrace ; you could not 
sink, or but sink into him. Your life plan has 
failed ; but he has had his own plan concerning 
you, and that has been fulfilled to a tittle. Believe 
that his plan was the wisest and best. It is sel- 
dom, I suppose, that the life plan which any one 
devises for himself coincides with the plan of God 
concerning him. That higher plan may disappoint 
or it may transcend our present expectation ; but 
who that believes in God can doubt that his plan 
in the end will be found to surpass the wisdom of 
the wisest, and that the goal to which it leads will 
transcend the most sanguine hopes ? In the final 



284 OUR LIFE IS IN GOD. 

result, it will appear that we gain as well by our 
disappointments and failures as by our successes ; 
all human experience leads to ultimate good. In 
the beautiful fable of the poet, the wounded crane 
is left bleeding on the strand, while the rest of the 
flock pursue their annual flight to the milder clime 
of their desire, 

" And speed with sounding wings, and scream with joy." 

The maimed bird moans and despairs of the goal ; 
but she has lighted on a raft of lotus leaves and is 
borne gently on by wind and tide, while the long 
rest heals her wound, and so reaches at last the 
desired haven. 

The moving in God which thus verifies itself in 
the destiny of each individual, is still more con- 
spicuous in the destiny of nations, in the history of 
universal man. Viewed in its details, contem- 
plated at any given point of its annals, the world's 
history seems a confused jumble of meaningless 
events. One revolution succeeds another ; nations 
rise and fall ; wars civil and foreign, wars of ven- 
geance, and wars of invasion desolate the lands. 
Scarcely a year passes but in one or another 
quarter there is tumult and fighting and distress. 
What does it all mean, and whither does it tend ? 
Why cannot men live peacefully side by side in 
their native and providential neighborhoods, till 



OUR LIFE IS IN GOD. 285 

the earth, exchange their products, respect each 
others' rights and the brotherhood of man ? Why 
need there be any history, since wars and revolu- 
tions make history ; why any other history than 
the annals of the house ? It is a simple question, 
and the answer is equally simple : Because man 
is man ; because these things are constitutionally 
in him ; and, being in him, must have their way. 
Moreover, they are in him, we must think, for 
some good purpose ; and we shall find, if we study 
their operation, that the growth of man is promoted 
by them, — growth in knowledge, and through in- 
crease of knowledge growth in good. If these 
things were not, the world would remain station- 
ary ; but the world moves, and it moves in God. 
He has drawn the lines of his world plan around 
and through all this confusion and strife, and is 
working out by it the final triumph of his kingdom 
in the world. There is no accident in history ; it 
has its method, and the method is God's. In every 
war, each battle that is fought, whether lost or won 
for this or that army, is won by God. Every bat- 
tle that is fought, however disastrous for the party 
defeated in the conflict, is a victory for man. In 
every conflict, whoever else may lose, whatever 
else may suffer, humanity wins. Through the 
seeming injustices of time, the overthrow of king- 
doms, the failure of races, the extinction of hopes, 



286 OUR LIFE IS IN GOD. 

through all violence and sacrifice, humanity wins 
at last. For humanity is God's ; his supreme will 
is co-present to all its movements ; in him is its 
foreordained path; in him its sure and sufficing 
goal. 

3. Finally, in him we " have our being." What 
does that mean, as distinct from the living and 
moving in God already discussed ? What is it to 
have our being ? Evidently something more than 
simply to be. To have a treasure is consciously to 
possess it. All creatures that exist have not their 
being, do not possess it with a conscious hold, re- 
joicing in it on its own account. Such having is 
possible only through the consciousness of God, in 
whom and whose our being is. To have our being 
is to refer it to its source, to receive it as divine, 
to cherish it as such, in spite of all cares and 
pains to feel it a blessing and a joy to be. There 
are times when the pressure of life with its worry 
and vexation and sorrow of heart seems greater 
than we can bear; and when, if there were nothing 
but the fear of death to restrain us, we would 
gladly fling it away as a weary, worthless thing. 
At such times we have not our being; we exist, 
but possess not ourselves; we have lost our hold 
of the Eternal. We feel ourselves, as it were, 
cut off from the parent tree and flung aside as a 
severed branch to wither. It is only by recurring 









OUR LIFE IS IN GOD. 287 

to our fixed roots, by casting ourselves on our eter- 
nal belongings ; it is only by thinking ourselves in 
God, — that solace and strength and the courage of 
life can return to us again. What matters it if 
to-day and to-morrow we chafe and suffer and bend 
beneath the storm ? To-day and to-morrow may 
rain their plagues and sores on our defenceless 
heads ; but are not ours the eternal years ? Have 
we not a reserve of undecaying strength ; have we 
not exhaustless resources in God, who is our home ? 
That home abides through storm and wreck, and 
in the thought of it we can feel secure when the 
earthly home is broken up and the ground on 
which we tread is slipping from under us, know- 
ing that neither time nor space, nor life nor death, 
can separate us from Him in whom we live and 
move and have our being. 



XXI. 

THE COMFORTER. 

It is expedient for you that I go away : for if I go 
not away, the Comforter will not come unto you ; but if 
I depart, I will send him unto you. John xvi. 7. 

r I ^HE Comforter, indeed ! What comforter could 
Jesus send to those bereaved followers of his, 
that should make good his place when he was gone ; 
and not only so, but should be so much more to 
them than his bodily presence as to make it ex- 
pedient that he should depart ? Surely no foreign 
agency was equal to this. They would suffer no 
third person to come in, as comforter, between 
them and their Master. Only Christ could replace 
Christ in their hearts. 

The Comforter that Jesus was to send to com- 
fort them, after his departure, was his own spirit. 
" I will not leave you comfortless : I will come to 
you." The Comforter was himself, — the spirit 
that dwelt in him, — his idea, his influence, the 
power of his word and life. We are accustomed 
to think that personal presence, if not the indis- 



THE COMFORTER. 289 

pensable condition, is at least the best medium of 
personal influence ; that a man acts most power- 
fully when he is in the body. But Jesus declares 
that his influence would be greater after his depar- 
ture than it could be during his earthly life ; that 
in fact his true influence could not begin until 
after his decease. " It is expedient for you, that I 
go away : for if I go not away, the Comforter will 
not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send 
him unto you." He would be nearer to his own, 
and he was nearer to them, after his departure, 
than he was in the flesh. He is nearer to every 
true disciple now, than he was to those who con- 
versed with him. The departed Christ exerted, and 
exerts, an influence which the personally present 
Christ could not. The person had to disappear be- 
fore the spirit could come and take possession of the 
soul. This is no exceptional case. The influence 
of any teacher, the influence of any good person, 
all moral and spiritual influences, are enhanced by 
death. They are greater, after the departure of 
the individual from whom they proceed, than they 
were, or could be, during his life. Death, which 
dissolves the form, disengages the idea, and pre- 
sents it pure, unmixed with foreign elements and 
qualifying personalities. 

We do not cease entirely, even for this world, 
when removed from it by death. The spirit that 

19 



290 THE COMFORTER. 

was in us, that made itself manifest in our life and 
action, remains behind us when we go hence. And 
not only so, but if it be a good spirit that wrought 
in us, it acquires from our very going such in- 
crease of meaning and of power that it seems to 
be a coming again, a new message from the spirit 
world, a power and comforter which we send after 
us to comfort and instruct the world we have left. 
Death is a giver, as well as a destroyer ; it gives 
us the idea of our departed with added influence 
and transfigured beauty. We know them better, 
we appreciate them more justly, we are more influ- 
enced by their example after their departure, than 
during their bodily presence among us. So that, 
considering the better influence that goes forth of 
them when they have put off their mortality, it 
might seem expedient that they should go away, in 
order that the spirit which was in them may come 
to us and act upon us as it could not come and 
act when they were with us. 

If ever it has happened to you to lose a near and 
valued friend, whose character commanded your 
respect, — one valued for his or her moral quali- 
ties, as well as endeared by relation and friend- 
ship, — and especially if such a friend was taken 
unexpectedly and seemingly prematurely from your 
side ; if ever this experience has been yours, you 
will bear witness that the character of the de- 



THE COMFORTER. 291 

ceased never seemed to you so worthy of respect, 
nor ever so strongly impressed you ; that you 
were never so disposed to be guided by it and to 
act in the spirit of the departed ; that you never 
felt that spirit so near as when withdrawn from 
your senses by the putting off of the mortal form 
through which you conversed with it. " God," 
says a contemporary, " only lends us the objects 
of our affection ; the affection itself he gives us in 
perpetuity. In this sense instances are not rare 
in which the friend or the parent then first begins 
to live for us when death has withdrawn him 
from our eyes and given him over exclusively to 
our hearts. I have known a mother, among the 
sainted blest, sway the will of a thoughtful child 
far more than her living voice ; brood with a kind 
of serene omnipresence over his affections, and 
sanctify his passing thought by the mild vigilance 
of her pure and loving eye. And what better life 
could she have for him than this ? " 

Such is, or may be, the influence of the departed 
in the sphere of the family. But most of us have 
other relations to our fellow-men than that of the 
family. We occupy, with our word and action and 
example, a wider sphere than the household life. 
An influence goes forth of us to all with whom we 
are connected, to all with whom business or acci- 
dent brings us in contact, and even to those who 



292 THE COMFORTER. 

know us only by report. And when we decease 
from the sphere of this world, our influence does 
not decease, but stays behind us as a second self, 
an invisible presence to counsel and to cheer, — if 
in us, while living, there was anything from which 
counsel or cheer could come. It may act more 
powerfully through our memory than it could do 
through our person. Especially is this the case 
when a friend or fellow-citizen has been removed in 
the vigor of his years, and in the midst of works 
and promise, and when the death was sudden and 
attended with circumstances peculiarly painful and 
impressive. These serve as a background from 
which the character of the departed derives a 
stronger relief, and his influence an added force 
in the circle in which he moved and wrought. 
Such deaths we term untimely, and they are apt to 
suggest questions of God's providence and doubts 
of that supreme wisdom which piety claims for the 
course of things. We think, with impatience, how 
many worthless beings, whose existence is a bur- 
den and a plague to society, are permitted to live 
on ; while the active citizen, who lived but to bless, 
the Christian philanthropist, whom society cher- 
ished as a necessary element in its organism, is 
stricken from the civic roll, and swept from the 
family circle, — leaving, instead of a vital and be- 
neficent force, a miserable blank behind. But if 



THE COMFORTER. 293 

we view these cases calmly and hopefully, we may 
find in them that which shall justify the ways of 
God to the understanding, as to faith they are 
already justified. We may find in the heightened 
impression and added value which such departures 
give to the character and life of the departed, and 
the consequent accession of moral influence which 
comes from their idea to those who rejoiced in 
their presence and who lament their going, — we 
may find here a reason why it was expedient for 
them to go away, seeing they could send such a 
spirit and comforter after them to replace their 
person and requite their loss. 

A complete life, according to the common idea, — 
that is, a lengthened life of active usefulness, gen- 
tly subsiding into old age, and gradually terminat- 
ing in slow decay, — would seem to be the order of 
nature. Such a life we regard as the true ideal of 
human existence. It is the violation of this order, 
the contrast with this ideal, that makes a shortened 
life, abruptly closing in the midst of its years, so 
impressive. The feeling of incompleteness which 
attaches to such a life, the indefinite possibilities for 
which we gave it credit, the promise (now never to 
be fulfilled) of great achievements which we dis- 
cerned in it, — all tend to bring out and to glorify 
the idea of the individual so doomed, and to make 
its action on us more effective than perhaps it 



294 THE COMFORTER. 

would have been if the course of nature had been 
fulfilled. We indemnify ourselves for our disap- 
pointment in the actual, by devoutly cherishing 
the ideal. We enthrone the departed in our hearts, 
and make him one of the comforters and lights of 
our life. 

" It is expedient for you that I go away." Meas- 
ured by earthly standards, the life of Jesus was sin- 
gularly incomplete, singularly abrupt and untimely 
his departure. After one or two years devoted to 
popular instruction and active beneficence, in his 
thirty-second or thirty-third year, — as is commonly 
supposed, — at an age when most men have scarcely 
arrived at the full maturity of their powers, or be- 
gun to act with marked and appreciable effect on 
their time, he is snatched from the world by a 
violent and awful death. According to human 
calculations, what a failure was here, and how 
much better it would have been had such a life 
been spared, and permitted to complete the ordi- 
nary term of mortal years. If in two or three 
years so much was accomplished, what might not 
a ministry of thirty years have done for mankind ? 
So we reckon, vainly thinking to measure moral 
results by material quantities, and to gauge the 
spirit of God by calendar years, as if the salva- 
tion of man were an arithmetical problem, — so 
many saved by a two years' ministry, how many 



THE COMFORTER. 295 

would thirty years save ? The issues of spirit are 
incommensurable with sections of time or with 
any finite measure. A truer appreciation of spir- 
itual laws and divine methods will teach us that 
Christ accomplished more in the shorter term than 
he would have done in a longer; that he accom- 
plished more by his death than he would have 
done by a lengthened life. 

If we attempt to imagine to ourselves a different 
issue from that ordained and historic one; if we 
conceive of Jesus as happily escaping the machi- 
nations of his enemies, and finally outliving their 
hostility, persisting in his work of instruction and 
healing, travelling from place to place with wise 
counsels and kind deeds, living on from year to 
year, growing old in that ministry of love, and pass- 
ing away at last in extreme age, — if we imagine all 
this, instead of the judgment-hall and the cross, we 
have certainly a more agreeable picture for the 
mind's eye to contemplate. But the more we dwell 
upon it, the more we shall feel its inadequacy, con- 
sidered as a means to the great end of the world's 
redemption by Christ. The more we shall miss in 
it the element of strength that lay in that very 
shock which the cross inflicted on believing and 
loyal hearts, the miraculous impulse which came 
from the sense of outraged justice and love, the 
inspiration breathed by the terror and the grief 



296 THE COMFORTER. 

of Calvary, the haunting presence and pressing 
admonition of the " Master's marred and wounded 
mien," coupled and contrasted with the bursting 
joy of the resurrection; we shall miss the divine 
fury which possessed those disciples, which in- 
fected their hearers and spread its fierce contagion 
from the Persian Gulf to the foot of the Pyrenees, 
which made the Church a consuming fire to burn 
and purge the world. These are the influences 
which made the Gospel to prevail, and planted a 
heavenly kingdom on the earth. And for these 
the world is indebted to the cross, to the early 
and painful termination of the ministry of Christ. 
All this would have been wanting to the milder 
fate, which we have supposed, of a lengthened 
life and a peaceful close. It is no mere figure of 
speech which the Christian world makes use of, 
when it ascribes its salvation to the death of 
Christ. It was his death that interpreted his life, 
— that gave to his idea its just relief, its true im- 
port and rightful influence. It was his death 
that, interposing at mid-tide, when life was at its 
flood, threw open the sluices of that life to water 
the earth ; that delivered the spirit of Christ from 
the narrow confinement of a person and made it 
an impersonal and prevailing power. We see how 
expedient, in this sense, his going was. It was 
God's expedient for securing his triumph. Hav- 



THE COMFORTER. 297 

ing gone as an individual, he was to come again as 
the spirit of truth and love. 

And he did come, — with what effect let the 
spread of his name and the triumphs of his truth 
in Christian ages declare. He came to the early 
Church, in their day of weakness, when an upper 
chamber in a private house was large enough for 
all Christendom to assemble in. He visited them 
with those pentecostal inspirations, which opened 
their lips with power, and overflowed their hearts 
with joy. 

"He came in tongues of living flame, 
To teach, convince, subdue ; 
All powerful as the wind he came, 
As viewless too." 

He came to Saul, on the way to Damascus, and 
poured himself into that chosen vessel to be car- 
ried by him round the world. He came to his 
own, — how often in the long agony of persecuting 
centuries, — and his own did receive him ; and as 
many as received him, to them he gave power to 
become the sons of God. He came to them in 
stripes and bonds, and replenished them with the 
comforts of the Holy Ghost. He made them bold 
to face an empire's wrath, and strong to bear an 
empire's rod. Through him they " subdued king- 
doms, . . . stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the 
violence of fire, . . . turned to flight the armies of 



298 THE COMFORTER. 

the aliens." He still comes to all who will receive 
him. He comes in every strong conviction, in 
every earnest purpose, in every holy aspiration 
which visits believing souls. "Wherever good men 
and true are gathered together in his name, — in 
the name of Christian truth and righteousness, — 
he is with them to the end of the world. 

" If I go not away, the Comforter will not come 
unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you." 
The person must depart, that the indwelling spirit 
may come in all its purity, and act with its greatest 
power. For though the person is a necessary me- 
dium of spiritual influence up to a certain point, — 
that is, until the spirit it represents is introduced 
to the world, — when once that spirit is planted 
and started, the person may be only a confinement 
and a hindrance, occasioning confusion between 
that which is personal and that which is spiritual, 
between the accidental and the absolute, the partial 
and the universal. There are Christians who still 
confound these distinctions in the case of Christ, 
after so long a lapse of years, for whom Jesus the 
person has not yet gone away, and the Comforter 
not yet come ; who see in him only what is partial 
and historical, and regard not the absolute and 
universal truth for which he stands, — the eternal 
Word incarnated in him. 

What is true of our theology, is it not also 









THE COMFORTER. 299 

true of our human relations ? We think too much 
of the person and too little of spirit. We anchor 
our existence on the perishing forms in which 
God has embodied his everlasting ideas ; and 
when the form is withdrawn, we feel as if noth- 
ing were left, as if our moorings were cast, and 
we adrift on the merciless flood. Yet let us re- 
member that what is valuable and lovable in a 
friend is not the visible which perishes, but the 
invisible which remains ; not the form in your eye, 
but the idea in your mind. Was there anything 
noble, winning, heroic, or saintly in the being now 
deceased from your eyes ? It is still here, and 
more truly here, more broadly and intensely pres- 
ent and active than before ; a spirit, about and 
within ; a thought in the mind ; a whisper at the 
heart ; a motion in the will ; an image in your 
dream. 

And so we are surrounded by spirits of the 
departed, — not in the coarse sense of personal 
entities lurking in the air, but in the sense of 
memories, ideas, immaterial comforters and guides. 
I said surrounded, — I should have said we are 
made up of them. Our life is composed of many 
lives, — myriads of spirits are absorbed in ours. 
All who once have lived in this world are still here, 
They have bequeathed an idea, they have left a 
spirit, which humanity has, consciously or uncon- 



300 THE COMFORTER. 

sciously, appropriated, assimilated, and made a part 
of its complex life. And we, when we go hence, 
must add our contribution, be it good or evil, to 
this vast sum. The spirit that was in us, the idea 
which we represent in our life, will remain when 
our person has vanished from the scenes of time. 
It will remain when our memory has perished 
from the mind of man. May our word and act 
be such, that the spirit which we leave behind us 
shall be a living and beneficent power to society. 
When we go away in person, as soon we must, 
may we come again in spirit, and be as comforters 
to those that remain and to those that come after ! 



XXII. 

ALL SOULS' DAY. 

I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, con- 
cerning them which are asleep. l Thess. iv. 13. 
God is not the God of the dead, but of the living. 

Matt. xxii. 32. 

T^HIS day, this second of November, in many 
"*• parts of the Christian world is devoted to the 
commemoration of the dead. On the day preced- 
ing, — on the first of November, "All Saints' Day," 
— the Roman Chnrch celebrates the memory of the 
" Saints, " distinctively so called, — the heroes and 
elect of Christian history. To-day the celebration 
embraces, in the way of affectionate remembrance 
if not of praise, all our departed friends. On 
this day, in Catholic countries, surviving kin- 
dred visit the graves of their beloved, and while 
renewing the wreaths on their sepulchres, renew 
the memory of a friendship which death could not 
conquer, and confess the still subsisting force of 
ties which the grave does not sever, of obliga- 
tions which the grave does not cancel. In the 



302 ALL SOULS' DAY. 

gayest of modern cities, in Paris, the capital of 
pleasure, the world of fashion adjourns this day 
from boulevard and saloon to the place of the 
dead, and with tender recollections and offices of 
love holds spiritual converse with the spirit 
world. 

For what converse with spirits is possible to man 
in the flesh but that of thought and feeling, of 
memory, aspiration, love, — the fellowship of the 
spirit. The fellowship of the spirit is unbroken ; 
the soul's relations with souls remain. Whether 
lodged in the flesh, or however housed, — in spirit 
they are not divided. There is a bridge, though 
idle curiosity has found none, — a bridge from 
the world of sense to yonder side. Memory and 
Love are the high pontiffs that span the gulf 
and maintain unworded communications between 
the two. 

All souls are concerned in this mediation, and, 
it may be, are moments and articulations of it. 
Physical science suggests the existence of a subtle 
ether pervading space and permeating all the sys- 
tems which space enfolds, thus furnishing the 
necessary medium of communication by which light 
and other influences are transmitted from world to 
world ; for science will have no waste void. The 
spiritual world is no more a void than the mate- 
rial ; not a vacuum is it, but a plenum, — a world 



ALL SOULS' DAY. 303 

all filled and filling all. God and his spirits, oc- 
cupying all with all fulness, — they in him, and he 
through them, — are the circulating and pervading 
medium hy which thought and feeling are con- 
ducted and transmitted from soul to soul and from 
sphere to sphere. Wherever we may be in space 
the world of spirits is with us, and we should see, 
if the eyes of the spirit were opened, as the servant 
of Elisha saw when the armies of the Syrian con- 
founded him. " Fear not, " said Elisha, " for they 
that be with us are more than they that be with 
them." "And the Lord opened the eyes of the 
young man ; and he saw : and behold, the mountain 
was full of horses and chariots of fire round about 
Elisha." The visible associates with whom we 
converse, the dwellers on this earth, are not the 
only companions of our being. Everywhere the 
army of the unseen encompasses us; and not an 
individual in the countless host but is in some way 
connected with us, — if not related in the bonds of 
personal friendship, yet still related in humanity 
and in God. 

The feast of All Souls is a recognition of this 
bond and fellowship of spirit, which not only an- 
nuls all distinctions of caste and creed and clime, 
but reaches beyond the bounds of time, transcends 
this mortal life, and connects us dwellers in the 
dust with departed souls. It invites us to consider 



304 



ALL SOULS' DAY. 



our relation with the dead in its threefold aspect 
and degree as one of friendship, of gratitude and 
debt, and of spiritual affinity. 

1. Our relation with the dead is one of friend- 
ship. We are bound to departed souls by personal 
affections. Our own kindred are of that number ; 
for who can advance many steps in life without 
sending from the circle of his own some loved and 
loving representative as his forerunner and media- 
tor with the invisible ? We know not, we cannot 
divine, in what form and fashion the spirit survives 
that has put off this material by which we con- 
versed with it, or whether in the course of our 
immortal career there shall be a renewal of that 
converse, face to face, with mutual remembrance 
of former relations. But this we know, — that the 
soul which was bound to us by a true relation of 
mutual love and loyal friendship, which has 
wrought on our souls with enduring influence, is 
bound to us forever. The parent who trained our 
childhood, the child who has trained our maturer 
years, the trusting friend whom we held to our 
hearts with a trusting embrace, — these can never 
be lost to us ; they can never be entirely divorced 
from our souls. And though we may never, in 
the ordinations of Eternal Wisdom, meet again 
with mutual recognition, yet what they have been 
to us has so inwrought itself into all the texture 



ALL SOULS' DAY. 305 

of our being, has become so essential a constituent 
of our nature, that no lapse of time, nor remote- 
ness of place, nor diversity of fortune, nor inequal- 
ity of development, nor the dissolutions of death, 
nor the sundering of soul and spirit, nor the wear 
and tear of ages, can ever rend that experience 
from our lives or sever the being so related to us 
from our thought. So long as we remember our- 
selves, that being will remain a fixed idea in our 
minds. And though we should cease to remember 
our present self, though unforeseen convulsions of 
Nature, or the friction of time, or the ever unfold- 
ing life of the soul should erase the past from our 
recollection, and this earth-life with all its expe- 
riences should vanish like a dream of childhood 
from our thought, still the consequences of that 
connection, its influence on our character, its re- 
sult in our destiny, will endure, a fixed fact, an 
indestructible element of our being. I say, then, 
that our relation to the dead is first a relation of 
friendship and personal affection. 

2. In the next degree it is one of gratitude 
and debt, of benefits conferred and received, of 
service on one side and obligation on the other. 
The dead belong to us by their works; we are 
living on the fruit of their labors. Our life is 
rooted in and nourished by the past ; and the past 
is only a name for the thoughts and efforts and 

20 



306 ALL SOULS' DAY. 

products of those who have gone before us in the 
march of humanity, and left traces and fruits of 
their being and doing behind. The departed are 
our teachers, our counsellors, our benefactors. 
The arts by which we live, the cities we inhabit, 
the books which instruct us, the very language by 
which we communicate with our kind, — all these 
are so many links which connect us with the dead. 
Not a day passes but we avail ourselves of their 
ministry, and bring into requisition the works and 
devices of a countless multitude whose names in 
part have come down to us and in part are lost to 
us forever, but whose benefactions have passed into 
the treasury of human life and become inalienable 
possessions of the race. They have labored, and 
we have entered into their labors. We are living 
on the dead ; our life, like the coral islands reared 
by insects from the bosom of the deep, is made 
up of the contributions of myriads of minds and 
hands that have toiled for us in the fields of this 
world, and made it fruitful for all who come after. 
Our whole civilization is a bequest, and by it 
and in it we stand related to the army of the un- 
seen, — a countless host of teachers, benefactors, 
saviours. We come to the participation of their 
thought ; we are made partakers of the heritage of 
their example and the fruit of their labors. 

3. Our relation to the dead is a relation of 



ALL SOULS 9 DAY. 307 

affinity, — the bond of one nature, of a common 
humanity. The dead are our fellow-men, still 
our fellow-men. In removing from this visible 
world they have not withdrawn from the great 
family of man. On the contrary, they are more 
truly human — I speak of the glorified dead — than 
before. Humanity in them is more fully devel- 
oped; the image of God in them more perfectly 
brought out, more fitly expressed. We are related 
to them as men. For the same reason that we are 
taught to regard as brethren all men, of every 
zone and nation, of every tongue and kindred and 
religion, for the same reason should we recognize 
as brethren the departed who belong to the same 
spiritual household, the same moral brotherhood 
with ourselves; and with even greater reason, 
because, as I have said, they are more truly hu- 
man. If Christian sentiment will not suffer the 
intervening ocean to be a barrier to our sympa- 
thies, if it bids us extend the right hand of brother- 
hood to the dwellers in a distant clime and to 
cultivate friendly relations with our antipodes, how 
much rather should we fold in our regard and 
comprehend in our heart's embrace the departed, 
whom not the wide ocean but the narrow stream of 
death, the thin film of mortality, divides, or, it 
may be, does not divide from our communion ? 
How much nearer to us are the dead whom we 



308 ALL SOULS' DAY. 

know through their history, with whom we have 
conversed through their works, with whom, it may- 
be, we once conversed face to face, — how much 
nearer through their idea which remains to us, 
which haunts us still, — than the mass of our 
contemporaries, who are separated from us not only 
by interjacent space, but by faith, country, lan- 
guage, by all those habitudes which are most char- 
acteristic of our respective states, and who for 
the most part are to us as though they were not ? 
While, then, we cherish the thought that all men 
on all the face of the earth are our brethren, we 
will feel also that all the spirits of the departed in 
all the mansions of God are our brethren also. 
We will make room in our affection for all souls. 

Our relation to the dead is that of a common na- 
ture. We are related to them by a common intelli- 
gence, by the joint possession of those truths which 
we hold in common with all intelligent natures, 
whether in the body or out of the body, whether in 
this mundane sphere or wherever they may have 
their abode. There are not two kinds of intelli- 
gence. It is one and the same universal reason 
which pervades and informs all orders of being 
from intelligent man to the highest archangel. 
Whatever is truth here, is truth in every sphere of 
being. The spirits who have preceded us in the 
order of time, who are now, it may be, exalted 



ALL SOULS' DAY. 309 

above us in the order of being, — they too are in- 
formed by the same Wisdom, and fed from the 
same Fountain of divine illumination. As intelli - 
gent and moral beings we are related to all the 
dead; we belong to an innumerable company of 
angels, all irradiated by the same intelligence, all 
amenable to the same law, all confessing the same 
high calling. There is not an angel of the heavenly 
host but shares with us the same essential human- 
ity, but relates to us, ay, and appeals to us by that 
common nature which has the heavens as well as 
the earth for its use and unfolding. 

" ' Mortal,' the angels say, 
' Peace to thy heart ! 
We too, mortal, 
Have been as thou art. 



Ye too,' they gently say, 
' Angels shall be ; 
Ye too, mortals, 
From earth shall be free. 
Yet in earth's loved ones 
Still shall have part, 
Bearing God's strength and love 
To the torn heart.' " 

When we say man, we include the whole family 
in heaven and on earth — angels and mortals — 
in one designation. We include in that name the 
chosen Son of Man, " of whom, " says the apostle, 
" the whole family in heaven and earth is named. " 
And so we may call our relation to the dead a 



310 ALL SOULS' DAY. 

Christian relation. Humanity, terrestrial and ce- 
lestial, is one body in Christ, the ideal Head, sub- 
ject of one divine dispensation of truth and grace 
which embraces all, both mortal and angel, in one 
calling and hope. Mortal and angel are equally 
heirs of God, joint heirs with Christ in the heritage 
of glory. This Christian fellowship transcends all 
other relations. In Christ we are first divinely 
one, as being one with God, in whose unity all 
difference is reconciled and all contradiction 
solved. 

And this fellowship we believe embraces not 
those alone who are technically called Christians, 
who called themselves such on earth, but the loyal 
and loving of all religions, of all time. The true 
Church is the largest communion of man with 
man, — the fellowship of the spirit, the league of 
all souls that love the truth and seek the right. 

So then, by ties of affection, by social obliga- 
tions, by human affinities, by spiritual fellowship, 
we relate to the great congregation of the dead. 
Such are the terms of that society which embraces 
all souls in its capable communion. 

The contemplation has a practical significance 
and tendency for those who entertain it. It tends 
to expand the horizon of the heart. It stretches 
our sympathy to a largeness which takes in the 
whole family of man in heaven and earth, — of man 



ALL SOULS' DAY. 311 

in all the relations of life, in all stages of being. 
It makes ridiculous the paltry distinctions of caste 
and clique, the sorry limitations of calling and 
custom, which tether our affections. The world 
is large, and the human family is large and catho- 
lic, if we would but see and understand how large 
it is, and not bind ourselves to that infinitesimal 
portion of it with which we are connected by the 
accidents of life. We shut ourselves up in little 
circles of our own, of which calling and fashion 
and prejudice describe the circumference, and keep 
the keys. We associate in clans, and forget what 
a world it is to which we belong. We are not 
worthy to live in this great wide universe if we 
isolate ourselves in separate folds, and have no 
communion with our kind beyond the conventional 
walls in which custom and accident have immured 
us. We may venture to affirm that in heaven 
" there are no clans or cliques, no exclusive circles, 
no vulgar and respectable, no high or low. " There 
is but one distinction which crosses the grave ; that 
is the distinction of good and bad ; that pervades 
all orders and stages of the moral world. It 
bisects the universe; all other distinctions are 
merged in it. Let us learn the full significance of 
that distinction, and we shall rate at their true 
value the lesser and subordinate distinctions which 
divide man from man. Let us feel how small a 



312 ALL SOULS' DAY. 

thing is class or calling, how small is even country 
and race compared with the great household of 
spirits in which all these are comprehended. Let 
us feel how great and glorious a thing it is to be 
of that household, to be truly man, a rational 
soul, an undying spirit; and let our triumph be 
this, — that we are called to join that innumer- 
able company in the unwalled city of God, to 
sit down at the feast of all souls in heavenly 
communion. 

Again, our contemplation of the departed re- 
minds us how insignificant a circumstance is that 
which we call death in the annals of the soul, how 
little it can affect the soul's destiny in the great 
results of immortal life and illimitable time. 
When we read a book that interests and instructs 
us, when we study a character that moves and 
quickens us, it matters little, we hardly ask, 
whether the author of that book and whether that 
character is in the body or out of the body. They 
are living to us and equally present, whether they 
belong to that part of the host which has crossed 
the flood or to that which is crossing now. Nay, 
the flood itself disappears, the narrow stream has 
dried up, the two banks have met and closed while 
we thus communed. And the oftener we thus 
commune, the more we shall feel that death is of 
the body and not of the spirit, — that for the spirit 



ALL SOULS' DAY, 313 

there is no this world and that world, no here and 
there, no now and then, but one unbroken life, an 
everlasting now. We can easily conceive that the 
spirit should be unconscious of the body's death, 
so slight is the influence of a merely physical oc- 
currence on the spirit's life. 

The contemplation of the dead is a stimulus and 
motive-power to the living. It teaches the legiti- 
mate use of life ; it supplies new motives to faith- 
ful endeavor and earnest pursuit of the highest 
ends. What is it that survives of the dead where- 
in and whereby they still live and speak ? It is 
not the accidents of their condition, it is not their 
possessions or enjoyments. Death has stripped 
them of all that was extrinsic. Nothing remains 
but their character and works. Through these 
alone we know and commune with them. Accord- 
ing to these they take rank in our regard. Ac- 
cording to these they are classed and graded on 
the scale of time. Those who have wrought well 
have made mankind their debtors, and emblazoned 
their names on the heart of the world. Grateful 
posterity has registered an innumerable company 
of heroes and of saints who have blessed the world 
with their lives and made it fruitful with their 
deeds. They call to us, with all the voices of their 
renown, to follow in their steps, to use well the 
golden opportunities of life, to offer up ourselves a 



314 ALL SOULS' DAY. 

living sacrifice, that we may come in the lustre of 
useful and beneficent lives to the city of the living 
God, to the general assembly and Church of the 
first-born, and to the spirits of the just made 
perfect. 



XXIII. 

CONSCIENCE. 

TJieir conscience also bearing witness. 

Romans ii. 15. 

"VTO question which the human mind can pro- 
^ pose to itself is more momentous than that 
which concerns the grounds and authority of the 
moral law. We have the ideas of right and wrong, 
of moral obligation, of moral good and evil as 
distinguished from material. What is the origin 
of those ideas ? Not external Nature, whence 
most of our ideas are derived. Nature knows 
nothing of any moral law. " The deep saith, It is 
not in me. " The heavens, which are said to de- 
clare the glory of God, convey no whisper of a 
righteous Lord. Nature is unfeeling, unmoral; 
no sympathy with innocence, no preference of vir- 
tue, is manifest in all the world of sense. The 
sun shines as benignly on tragedies of violence 
and strife as on scenes of peaceful industry ; smiles 
as serenely on battle-fields reeking with carnage 
as on corn-fields ripening to the harvest. The 



316 CONSCIENCE. 

same breeze propels the pirate's craft and the 
missionary's sail. Nature knows no right and 
wrong except as reflections of the human mind. 
These ideas come from within. 

There is a faculty in man — an inborn faculty, 
I think we may call it — which manifests itself 
in three distinct functions: (1) It distinguishes 
between right and wrong, — in fact, creates that 
distinction ; (2) It commands the right and forbids 
the wrong, independently of any immediate loss 
or gain accruing from the one or the other ; (3) It 
punishes disobedience with suffering more or less 
acute, according to the moral development of the 
individual. Moral perception, moral obligation, 
moral retribution, — these are its three co-ordinate 
functions. There is no one word which fully ex- 
presses this faculty. We call it conscience, — 
a word which properly signifies "accompanying 
knowledge;" an inadequate designation, but we 
have to use it for want of a better, — conscience, 
or the moral sense. 

Reflecting on this faculty, I find in it the 
strongest proof of the being of God, — the God of 
religion, the only God whom it greatly concerns 
us to believe in. The old demonstrations of the 
being of God have lost their cogency in the light 
of modern thought, — notably, the argument' from 
design. The old theologians, possessed with the 



CONSCIENCE. 317 

idea of God, carried that idea into Nature, and 
found what they carried and what they would never 
have found had they not first had it in themselves. 
All that theology can honestly infer from Nature 
is almighty, intelligent power, with so much of 
beneficence as suffices to make life on the whole 
a blessing, and thereby to perpetuate animal 
existence on the earth. But granting — what all 
will not grant — that the universe must have had 
an intelligent author, that author in all that the 
material universe reveals is known to me only as 
a mighty, incomprehensible Power with which I 
have nothing to do but to take what it brings in 
the order of Nature of which I am part. An 
undiscriminating, inexorable Power, regardless of 
good and evil, is all that Nature shows of God. 
But this is not what we mean by God; there is 
nothing here of the Father and Friend, and noth- 
ing of the moral Ruler and Lord. But conscience, 
the feeling I have, and which all men have, of moral 
obligation refers me directly to a higher order 
than that of the visible creation, which is often 
apparently in conflict with it, favoring the wicked 
(where no physical conditions are violated) and 
afflicting the good; it refers me to a Supreme 
Law, as the head and source of that higher 
order; it is a feeling of accountableness to that 
Supreme. 



318 CONSCIENCE. 

We find a law in our minds which commands 
and forbids without regard to any visible advantage 
to be gained by doing or abstaining. Whence that 
law ? Whence that feeling of obligation ? Shall 
we say it is a mental illusion ? But how explain 
the universality of that illusion ? Shall we say it 
is the creation of our own wills ? But it often 
requires us to do violence to our own wills, to put 
restraint on ourselves, to act against the grain of 
our natures, — that is, our natural instincts and 
desires. It commands our wills, not our wills it. 
Shall we say it is a social tradition, a device of 
governments, hierarchical or secular, whereby to 
rule more securely ? But we find it prior to all 
priestly or civil codes and institutions. The rudest 
savage knows, without any instruction to that ef- 
fect, that there are things he must not do, and he 
feels compunction in doing them. Besides, if the 
moral law were the invention of governments, un- 
conditional obedience to government would be the 
universal dictate of the moral sense, the funda- 
mental axiom of the moral code ; but the dictates 
of conscience are sometimes found to contradict 
the decrees of governments, they sometimes en- 
join disobedience to the powers that be. Or shall 
we say what some philosophers, ancient and 
modern, have maintained, — that the moral sense is 
resolvable into the sense of utility, that experience 



CONSCIENCE. 319 

of what is useful and what is hurtful to society 
has taken the shape of law and assumed its au- 
thority ? But the study of ethnology will show 
that the feeling of moral obligation precedes all 
experience of utility; and cases may be named 
where utility and morality seem to conflict, — 
for example, the practices of exposing infants and 
putting to death the aged might seem to be use- 
ful to society ; while a well-developed moral sense 
forbids such acts. 

Turn the matter as we will, we are forced to the 
conclusion that the feeling of moral obligation in 
man is no illusion, or human invention, or govern- 
mental device. We are forced to the conclusion 
that the moral law is the voice of a higher than 
ourselves or than any earthly power. What else 
can it be ? What is it in us that says so impera- 
tively, speaking as by divine right, " Thou shalt " 
and " Thou shalt not, " — which orders us one way 
while every passion of the soul and every nerve in 
our body is drawing and driving us in another 
direction, and which punishes with the pangs of 
remorse disobedience to its behests ? We feel, we 
know, that its right to command is divine. Call 
it by what name we will, this uncontradictable, 
unbribable autocrat in human experience has more 
of the essence of Deity, is a surer witness of God, 
than anything else that man on this earth can 



320 CONSCIENCE, 

ever know. You have heard of the saying of a 
great philosopher, that two things above all others 
filled him with profoundest awe, — the starry 
heavens above and the moral law within. Both 
are sublime ; but to one who can free himself from 
the sensuous illusion of size, of mere material 
magnitude, the action of the moral law is, I think, 
the grander of the two. The martyr, obeying his 
moral convictions in the face of persecution and 
death, putting his single will against the world, 
defying Nature, surrendering his flesh to the rack 
when a word might set him free, is to my mind a 
more amazing spectacle, a grander object of con- 
templation than suns and systems, than all we 
see or conceive of material grandeur, stretch our 
thought as we will " from star to star, from world 
to luminous world, as far as the universe spreads 
its flaming wall." The material universe, take 
conscience out of it, is a film, nothing more ; and 
" we are such stuff as dreams are made of. " The 
moral alone gives meaning to life. 

We have next to consider the relation of con- 
science to human well-being. I utter a truism 
when I say that social order is not only dependent 
on moral conditions, but is the product of those 
conditions. When men come together in com- 
munities, they enact laws for mutual protection. 
Those laws presuppose and appeal to the moral 



CONSCIENCE. 321 

sense for their observance. Every one sees that 
if moral considerations were universally disre- 
garded and set aside, if no respect to right and 
wrong, or what we term such, determined or 
controlled the conduct of men, if mankind were 
governed by appetite and passion alone, if so- 
ciety were composed of individuals whose only 
aim was to make the rest of mankind subser- 
vient to their wants without regard to others' 
rights, — every one sees that if this were the 
character, and such, and such only, the governing 
forces of society, there would soon be an end not 
only of social well-being, but of social existence ; 
a complete disruption of the social state, univer- 
sal fighting of each against all, and chaos come 
again. Every one sees that there must be a cer- 
tain amount of conscientiousness, of what we call 
moral qualities, of honesty and good-will, of chas- 
tity, sobriety, truth, and honor, to make society 
possible. 

But a question may be raised and has been raised, 
— whether conscience is the real agent in this 
work ; whether the supposition of a separate moral 
sense, distinct from reason and understanding and 
all other intellectual faculties, is needed for this 
purpose ; whether the same results may not be at- 
tained by complete intellectual development which 
shall lead to clear discernment of what in the long 

21 



322 CONSCIENCE. 

run is hurtful and what beneficial to individuals and 
society, — in other words, by enlightened selfish- 
ness. It is maintained, as I have said, that moral- 
ity is only another name for utility, — that what we 
call the moral law is the sum of the axioms de- 
rived from men's perception of what is useful and 
what is pernicious. I believe, on the contrary, 
that without the moral sense as a guide, the 
moral utilities, the advantages accruing from right 
conduct would never have been discovered, or if 
discovered, would have furnished no motive suffi- 
ciently strong to counteract the temptations of 
selfish passion. Intent on material gain or sen- 
sual satisfaction, pursuing those ends alone, men 
would never have learned that justice and con- 
scious integrity and purity and self-restraint yield 
greater satisfaction and are more conducive to 
happiness than ill-gotten wealth or ill-gotten 
pleasure. The righteousness which is found to 
be so essential to prosperity will never be sought 
for the sake of that prosperity. A man may be 
never so strongly convinced on reflection that 
moral integrity is necessary to the preservation 
of the social order and personal well being, yet 
if destitute of moral life, he will not be induced 
to obey the moral law by any such considera- 
tion. The selfish instinct is too imperative and 
too self-confident to be controlled by any theo- 



CONSCIENCE. 323 

retical conviction. It will seek a shorter path 
to its goal than the strictness of the moral law. 
It is a true saying, that honesty is the best policy. 
It is equally true that policy without honesty 
would never have arrived at that conclusion. 
Selfish cunning does not take righteousness along 
with it as an aid to its ends, and such righteous- 
ness as now exists in the world did not come by 
the way of intellectual enlightenment and shrewd 
calculation of uses and gains. It is the product 
of that conscience which is not an intellectual 
perception but an independent principle of life, 
and is the only ingredient in the compound nature 
of man which can save it from ruin and secure its 
perpetuity from age to age. 

We are accustomed to say that the stability of 
our republican institutions depends on popular 
education. Educate the people and the republic is 
safe. The truth of that saying depends on what 
is meant by education. Reading and writing, 
grammar and arithmetic, will do very little for 
the preservation of the State. Intellectual attain- 
ments though they be of the highest, science devel- 
oped in all its applications, knowledge universally 
diffused, — there is no efficacy in these, however 
desirable for refinement and the comfort of life ; 
there is no efficacy in these to save a nation or 
avert its downfall. If conscience decays while the 



324 CONSCIENCE. 

intellect ripens, the rottenness will spread till it 
eats out the heart of the nation's life and prepares 
the way for the triumph of brute force, or, what 
is the same thing, of unscrupulous demagogism 
over liberty and right. Moral training is the 
crying want of the time. The one thing needful 
for the safety of the State is that the education 
of the moral sense in the young keep equal 
measure with intellectual discipline. By what 
means this moral education is to be accomplished 
is a question too wide for present discussion. 
Suffice it to say that where there is an adequate 
conviction of its necessity the means will not be 
wanting. 

Passing now from the State to the individual, 
we find in conscience the true custodian and only 
sure safeguard of individual well-being; a faith- 
ful monitor, whose voice if obeyed is a guaranty of 
peace under all external calamity, if disobeyed 
an avenger whose punishments countervail all 
external prosperity, — punishments which the 
Greeks figured as furies pursuing the transgressor 
with scorpion stings. The greatest suffering of 
which the human mind is capable is remorse. 
So intolerable has it proved that in some cases 
criminals undetected have been known of their 
own free will to surrender themselves to justice, 
preferring the utmost penalties of the law to the 



CONSCIENCE. 325 

pangs of unexpiated guilt. Others have sought 
refuge in suicide. A defaulting paymaster in the 
service of the United States wrote in his letter of 
confession : " It is a relief to me to be discovered, 
for I have been in a hell on earth for years." 
Would this man have used such language if con- 
science were merely an intellectual perception of 
the fit and the unfit ? Had he embarked his pri- 
vate property in a losing speculation and become 
bankrupt, the mistake might have caused suffer- 
ing ; but how different such suffering from the 
anguish caused by the conscious guilt of a violated 
trust ! 

On the other hand, it cannot be denied, not 
only that conscience is less active in some na- 
tures than in others, but that in some it seems 
to be altogether wanting. It has been found pos- 
sible to suppress this unwelcome monitor, to si- 
lence its protest, to ignore absolutely the moral 
law. Napoleon I. declared that the moral law 
did not apply to him. He deliberately ruled it 
out of his calculations. Others have done the 
same, and by stifling conscience have won a seem- 
ing success. The question arises : Has the moral 
law in their case been defeated ? Have they 
outwitted eternal Justice ? So it would seem if 
worldly success is synonymous with well-being, 
if riches and rank are veritable exponents of 



326 CONSCIENCE. 

the inner life. But what is the test ? What is 
happiness ? What is well-being ? What is it 
that at bottom we all are seeking, — the scrupu- 
lous and the unscrupulous alike, — that to which 
all other seeking is but means to an end ? I 
will call it, in one word, self-possession. To pos- 
sess ourselves completely, secure from all inward 
and outward annoyance, — that is the best that 
life can yield. All else that is desirable resolves 
itself into that. Without that all other goods yield 
but a partial and uncertain satisfaction. Which 
is the surest road to that full possession of one's 
self, — conscientious living or unscrupulous greed ? 
is a question which answers itself. And therein 
lies the answer to the previous question, Has the 
moral law been defeated by prosperous iniquity ? 

Deeper yet, truth of all truths, the moral 
law in man is the present God, — absolute being. 
It follows that violation of that law is so far loss 
of being, interior decay, rottenness, death. Does 
any one think by stifling conscience to sin with 
impunity ? Let him know that the world on which 
we are cast is projected on moral principles and 
cannot proceed nor subsist on any other. It re- 
ceives and refunds according to its kind our every 
act. Our life goes out of us industry and comes 
back to us bread, it goes out of us caution and 
comes back to us safety, it goes out of us duty 



CONSCIENCE. 327 

and comes back to us peace; or else it goes out 
of us negligence and comes back to us loss, it 
goes out of us wrong and comes back to us shame, 
it goes out of us sin and comes back to us 
death. 

The most perilous of moral states is that in 
which a man persists in evil courses and feels no 
pain in so doing. Remorse is bad and shame is 
bad, but a more pitiable evil is unconsciousness 
of the latent enemy which is secretly consuming 
the soul. Of that state Archbishop Whately, in 
his notes on Lord Bacon, finds a striking symbol 
in insect life. There is an insect called the 
ichneumon fly which sometimes pierces the body 
of the caterpillar in its larva state, and deposits 
eggs which are hatched and feed as larvae on the 
inward parts of their victim. A singular circum- 
stance connected with this process is that a cater- 
pillar thus attacked goes on feeding and apparently 
thriving quite as well during the whole of its larva 
life as any other insect of its species. For by a 
wonderful provision of Nature the ichneumon does 
not injure the organs of the larva, but feeds only on 
the future butterfly enclosed within it. It is im- 
possible to distinguish a caterpillar which has 
these enemies in it from any other until the close 
of the larva life. And then the difference ap- 
pears ; for while those larvae which have escaped 



328 CONSCIENCE. 

the parasites assume the chrysalis state and emerge 
as butterflies, of the unfortunate caterpillar that 
has been preyed upon nothing remains but an 
empty skin. Is there not, the Archbishop asks, 
something analogous to this in human life ? May 
not a man have a secret enemy within his own 
bosom, destroying his soul without interfering 
with his earthly well-being? 

"Conscience also bearing witness." Saint Paul 
affirmed this of the Gentile nations over whom the 
Law of Moses had no control, — subjects of a law 
which transcends all written codes. With wonder 
and awe I contemplate that witness, old as human 
nature and as indestructible, — conscience, that 
power in man which reared the heavens of our 
truest hope and dug the hell of conscious guilt, 
which voiced by Christ caused the old heathen 
world to shrivel like a scroll, which stirred by 
Luther rent Europe in twain, — conscience which 
sent our fathers across the deep, and gave us this 
land of our inheritance. 

Respect that witness, listen to that oracle, heed 
its testimony, all who wish well to yourselves and 
mankind! Let no earth-born philosophy impugn 
its significance ; for as God liveth, his word is in 
it, and on it hangs the salvation of the world. 



XXIV. 

THE FUTUEE LIFE. 

It doth not yet appear what we shall be. 

1 John iii. 2. 

/^\F all the received doctrines of our religion 
^^^ there is none concerning which such crude 
ideas have prevailed and still prevail as those 
which respect the future immortal life; there is 
none regarding which the views of Christians have 
more widely diverged, none whose determinations 
by Church authority have so little warrant in 
reason, and yet there is none in which the light 
of reason is more needed. 

The oracles of the New Testament but faintly 
illustrate the subject. The views entertained, 
the imagery used by the early Church, belong to a 
period when the knowledge of the material uni- 
verse was yet in its infancy ; when this earth, of 
which a comparatively small portion had been 
explored, was regarded as the whole of animate 
Nature, — sun, moon, and stars being only the 
greater and lesser lights thrown in for the use of 



330 THE FUTURE LIFE. 

man; when the sky was conceived to be a solid 
dome enclosing these; when God was supposed 
to have his dwelling in a fixed locality above, 
whence he looked down to behold the children of 
men; and when the ground beneath our feet was 
believed to be the cover of a pit where the souls 
of the departed were confined, those only excepted 
whom Christ had raised up to dwell with him in 
the heights. 

Science has exploded the old traditions. The 
scientific mind refuses to believe in a prison of 
souls under ground; it refuses to believe in a 
simultaneous resurrection of the dead on a certain 
day announced by the blast of a trumpet; it re- 
fuses to believe in a local heaven above the skies. 
The old representations of heaven and hell by 
Christian poets are no longer admissible even in 
fiction. But what has science established in 
place of the old traditions ? Nothing satisfac- 
tory, nothing that reason and hope alike accept. 
"It doth not yet appear what we shall be." 
Still we persist to inquire if haply we may lift a 
corner of the veil. Nor is it wholly an idle curi- 
osity that seeks to explore the unknown future. 
But little is gained by wild conjecture peeping 
through imaginary " gates ajar, " and finding what 
it wishes to find, while verifying nothing. The 
fact of a hereafter of the soul being granted, the 



THE FUTURE LIFE. 331 

nearest approach we can make to a rational theory 
concerning it must begin with eliminating error, 
and not with dogmatic assertion. 

One error which still lingers in the popular 
mind is that of locality. Men dream of migrating 
to some new place, some unknown region of the 
universe where the spirits of the blest are to have 
their abode. Paul speaks of a third heaven in 
accordance with the Jewish conception of three 
celestial stages, — the first being the region of 
the clouds; the second, the starry firmament; 
the third, the dwelling-place of God and his 
saints. The latter is the heaven of Christian tra- 
dition. No enlightened person nowadays be- 
lieves in any such locality. Nevertheless, as I 
have said, there abides the popular impression of 
a local heaven, some new dwelling-place to which 
the soul is transported after death, — as if any 
region of the universe were better adapted to 
moral and spiritual uses than this. And these 
uses are all that really concern us in this con- 
nection. What need of migration to give us all 
that other worlds can supply ? Why not suppose 
that the soul disencumbered of the flesh may read 
in God whatever is or passes in any remote world, 
and through the divine ubiquity be there in sym- 
pathy, perhaps in effect, without personal presence ? 
Have you a friend at the opposite end of the earth, 



332 THE FUTURE LIFE. 

you may at any moment be sympathetically with 
him; in the twinkling of an eye may transport 
yourself to him in thought, while the lightning 
loiters on the telegraphic road. What to a soul 
in the flesh is mere subjective experience, mere 
thought, may to a soul unconditioned by fleshly 
limitations be real communication through union, 
as I said, with the omnipresent Mind. There are 
stories which tell of the appearance of the dying 
to distant friends. I am forced to believe in the 
possibility of such apparitions. They may not be 
an actual presence of the object, but only a vision 
begotten by one soul on another, showing however 
the possibility of a communication of soul with 
soul independently of place and time. 

Another error is that which supposes the here- 
after to be for all who escape damnation a state of 
unqualified and endless happiness. This is what 
heaven means in the vulgar apprehension. I can- 
not but think it a misfortune that the grand doc- 
trine of a future life should have come to be re- 
garded as a question of happiness or unhappiness, 
as if that were the supreme interest of the soul. 
It is not an elevating view of man's immortal 
destination which makes enjoyment a synonym of 
heaven, — makes that the main thing, the all in all. 
Enjoyment is needed in this life to relieve and 
complement low conditions of humanity ; but even 



THE FUTURE LIFE. 333 

in this life the higher we rise in the scale of being 
the more sober life becomes, Beyond the bounds 
of this mortal must not the law be the same ? 
The spirit's growth is the only thing in the here- 
after worth considering, — the only object for which 
an eternal existence is wanted, for which a wise 
man would care to live again. To settle down in 
a view of immortality in which this is not su- 
preme ; to conceive of heaven as an endless holi- 
day, good times and no trouble, an eternity of 
sweets, — degrades the whole subject. And when 
I hear people talk of going to heaven as a place 
of entertainment, and of life in heaven as a social 
reunion, I am reminded of the Japanese fable of 
the frogs who climbed a hill and raised them- 
selves up to view the country beyond of which 
they had heard ; but standing on their hind legs 
and having their eyes in the back of their heads, 
saw only the country they had left behind. It is 
labor, effort, ay, conflict, suffering, that give dig- 
nity to life! If the life hereafter is to have 
none of these, but only pleasure, then I say it is 
less respectable than the life that now is. Theo- 
logians have discussed to satiety the question of 
endless suffering; when will theology face the 
question of endless happiness ? When will reason 
explode those saccharine dreams of heaven which, 
I fancy, are more demoralizing than the fear 
of hell ? 



334 THE FUTURE LIFE. 

A third error which needs to be eliminated from 
the vulgar conception of heaven is that which 
makes it a finality, — which conceives that the 
disembodied soul passes at once from the wreck 
of death to a world to which there is no beyond, 
is "fixed in an eternal state," where fear and hope 
alike expire because there is nothing to gain or to 
lose. This view, which if not dogmatically af- 
firmed is tacitly assumed and seems to be implied in 
all popular discourse of the future state, contradicts 
the analogies of Nature, our surest guide in these 
inquiries. That the life of the rational soul has 
but these two epochs, — the one embracing the few 
years of earth, the other the sumless ages of eternity ; 
that our little earth-life, say the life of a child that 
dies in its fifth or its first year, and, compared 
with what follows, the years of the octogenarian 
are of no more account, — that this little earth- 
life, I say, is the prelude and introduction to a 
life that has no end, is a view which affronts alike 
the understanding and the moral sense. I will 
rather suppose that as this life is prelude and 
preparation for the one which succeeds, so that 
again is prelude and preparation for another, and 
that for still another, and that no existence of a 
finite immortal can be absolutely final. How far 
the interstices which separate these successive ex- 
istences or stages of immortality may resemble 



THE FUTURE LIFE. 335 

death I do not care to inquire ; but I believe that 
breaks and interruptions answering to the death of 
the body may be needed to divide the vast reaches of 
infinite time, in order that the soul, refreshed by 
sleep and forgetting, may resume with new-born 
vigor and hope its endless road. I see not how 
else a finite soul can bear the burden of its past 
or obtain the needful renewing of its life. 

If then we strike out from the popular concep- 
tion of the life to come the local heaven, the 
perennial entertainment, and the final goal, what 
remains to rational faith and Christian hope of the 
doctrine of immortality ? The one point of prime 
importance, that for which the belief in immor- 
tality commends itself to universal reason, is 
progress, progressive development by altered con- 
ditions and new experience. All that a future 
existence can yield beyond the capacity of the 
present may be summed under three heads, — 
three heavens we may call them. They repre- 
sent an ascending scale of beatitudes, adjusted 
to the growing wants of the soul, — Rest, Vision, 
Action. 

1. Best. The first and lowest heaven may be 
indicated by the word " rest. " Under this name I 
include all that is merely passive in the heavenly 
life, all that is given us by new conditions of 
being, the immunities appertaining to the better 



336 THE FUTURE LIFE. 

world of Christian hope, and which mere release 
from the flesh and from fleshly wants may be ex- 
pected to yield. No word brings heaven so near 
to the weary soul as that word " rest. " After a 
day of wearing toil and harassing care, our wishes 
are apt to concentrate in the thought of utter 
repose, of a long, unbroken, dreamless sleep. 
And there are moments when the whole of this 
earth-life wears such an aspect of stormy dis- 
quietude, vexation, and suffering that all we 
covet is release, — : " as the hireling longeth for 
the shadow ; " discharge from the warfare and 
ceaseless friction of mortal life, — to "shake the 
yoke of inauspicious stars from this world-wearied 
flesh." 

Accordingly, the word most often employed by 
Scripture and hymn to denote the satisfactions of 
the life to come is " rest. " The Hindu religions 
pursued this idea beyond the scope of Christian 
thought. Starting with the doctrine that exist- 
ence as such is an evil, that for even the most for- 
tunate and blessed it were better not to have been 
born, and that therefore the penalty for the sins of 
this life is to live again in some other body, and 
still again until mortal sins are all wiped out, 
they arrived at the logical result that the supreme 
good, the heaven which awaits the finally emanci- 
pated soul, is Nirvana, absorption in God, and with 



THE FUTURE LIFE. 337 

it cessation of individual conscious life. The 
" rest " of the Christian heaven stops short of this, 
although, as sometimes presented, it borders on 
Nirvana, and contains, if rigorously analyzed, a 
character of nihilism; as where good Dr. Dod- 
dridge sings, — 

" Fain would we quit this weary road, 
And sleep in death to rest with God." 

The rest contemplated by Christian believers 

does not mean the rest of unconsciousness, but 

release from mortal harms and plagues, immunity 

from all disquietude and tribulation, existence 

without struggle or friction. This is the supposed 

rest 

" That for the Church of God remains 
The end of cares, the end of pains, " — 

very soothing, very consoling, very needful per- 
haps, in certain moods of the storm-tossed mind, 
but, let us confess, not very uplifting, not very 
inspiring, not sufficing to our best aspiration, not 
equal to the highest idea of immortality. Let 
us leave this lower heaven and ascend in our 
thought to the next above it, the heaven of — 

2. Vision. One of the noblest, the most persis- 
tent and inappeasable cravings of human nature 
is the thirst for knowledge, the desire to penetrate 
all mysteries, to pierce to the innermost heart of 
truth, to see face to face, to know as we are 

22 



388 THE FUTURE LIFE. 

known. This want the old theology met with the 
promise of the "Beatific Vision," to which the 
perfected soul was admitted as the last reward of 
faithfulness, the consummation of all blessedness, 
the joy of contemplating absolute Truth, the ec- 
stasy of knowing all that can be known, — ■ all that 
the curious mind, forever baffled in its search, 
vainly tugging at the veil which shrouds the mys- 
tery of things, had failed to discover while bound 
by mortal limitations, — all "that the angels de- 
sire to look into; " of knowing it, not by uncertain 
report, but by reading its idea in the mind of God, 
gazing with rapt contemplation on the Uncreated 
Light in which all truth is revealed, — this the 
mediaeval theology figured as the last and highest 
heaven. Dante, who represents that theology and 
sings that heaven, says, — 

" It may not be that one who looks 
Upon that Light can turn 
To other object willingly his view. 
For all the good that will can covet, 
There is summed, and all, elsewhere 
Defective, found complete." 

No doubt, to see and know is consummate bliss. 
I can imagine the soul to bask unwearied, to bask 
forever in the joy of contemplation, seeking, 
dreaming of nothing beyond. But viewing the 
matter in the light of practical reason, I ask my- 
self: Are seeing and knowing, after all, the su- 



THE FUTURE LIFE. 339 

preme thing, the highest that thought can imagine, 
the uttermost to which will can aspire ? Contem- 
plation is passive, and it seems to me that if the 
beatitude of vision is the goal where all the yearn- 
ings of the soul and all its strivings and all its 
discipline end, such a consummation would have 
but little advantage over the Nirvana, or absorp- 
tion in God, of the Buddhist faith. Across all 
these ecstasies of vision, as I think of them in my 
musing on the future of the soul, I hear a voice 
saying, " Come up higher ! " Vision is divine, but 
there is something diviner. 

3. Action. The third and highest heaven, as I 
gauge the soul's destiny, is action. That which 
we most adore in God, is not the omniscience 
to which all things are manifest, but the love- 
power which manifests itself in all things. It 
is not his word, but his work, in which the God- 
head is complete. And if we may speak of the 
joy of God, who for a moment will compare the 
joy of beholding with the joy of creating ? Who, 
if such works were possible to finite being, would 
not rather be able to create the smallest flower, 
to give life to the simplest creature, than to 
know every secret of Nature ? Great is the joy 
of the seer in his vision; greater the joy of 
the artist in his work. The Easter song in 
"Faust" speaks of the risen Christ as "near to 



340 THE FUTURE LIFE. 

creative joy." That seems to me the climax of 
all blessedness. I can figure to myself no greater 
joy than that of co-operating with creative Intelli- 
gence, if he with whom being and creating are 
one shall choose to confer that privilege on his 
elect. But whether or not this special privilege, 
the joy of creating, shall be vouchsafed to the 
more advanced stages of spirit life, beneficent ac- 
tion in one or another mode, beneficent action by 
every agency possible to finite natures, I conceive 
to be an essential feature and the supreme element 
in the blessedness of heaven, — a blessedness tran- 
scending even the Beatific Vision. Without in- 
tensest and ceaseless action the life to come would 
want, in my view, its crowning joy. In this house 
of our mortality the lagging will, the exhausted 
nerves, the feeling of utter weariness, and often 
of incompetence and failure in our utmost effort, 
may find relief in the anticipation of perfect rest ; 
but our truest thought and highest mood will seek 
in action the beatitude nearest to God, in fellow- 
ship of work with the Ever-working its highest 
heaven. 

To the question where in the universe of worlds 
this heaven may be found, I answer, Here. And 
by "Here" I mean wherever the question may 
arise, — on this earth or in the farthest star. 
Death is not a locomotive by which the soul is 



THE FUTURE LIFE. 341 

transported to some distant sphere, but a drop- 
ping of the veil of flesh which hides the spiritual 
world from our sight With the dropping of that 
veil the seen and temporal melts into the eter- 
nal. When the sun sets, new suns come forth; 
and when the material world fades from our 
bodily eyes, the vision comes of the immaterial 
which underlies and overlies and pervades and 
upholds it ; and with the vision will come, let us 
hope, the new-born will and the new career. 



THE END. 



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